


Frostburn

by Markition



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alcohol, Domestic Fluff, Experimental Sex, First time for Yuuri, First times in general, Ice skating at midnight on frozen lakes, Learning how to exist in a domestic setting, M/M, Mental Illness, Mention of past championships, Russia's longstanding homophobia, The boys learning more about each other, Victor having deep-seated emotional issues, Victor proving that he can coach and skate, Victor's past coming back to haunt them, drunk sad Victor, mention of Victor's past relationship, yuuri's anxiety
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-15 14:38:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9239315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Markition/pseuds/Markition
Summary: Russia is a new place, with new rules. A new game. And Victor has played this game before, but never like this, never with Yuuri at his side. This is the first time he is playing with something to lose.





	1. Strategies

 

The Sports Champions Club in St. Petersburg was the home base of at least a dozen skaters, all of varying ages. Most of them were still in the Junior division, and were not around the rink until later in the day, after the schools let out for the afternoon. It meant that the best time to get practice in was in the morning, when the rink was deserted other than the other senior division competitors. It was a routine Victor was familiar with. Rousing at the first light of dawn, running down to the rink for a few hours of work before sleeping away the rest of the afternoon. He’d been in that routine for twenty years. A blur of routine design, relentless perfecting, of shattering record after record. Eventually he was only competing against different versions of himself, from years before. It created a sort of storybook out of a life. He died on the podium, and was born anew with the next season.

Coming back to that posed its own challenges.

The first challenge came early that morning, when he’d convinced himself to pull away from the carefully tangled nest of limbs and blankets that Yuuri had become. The extraction was delicate, graceful, but  _ very _ reluctant. Yuuri also slept like a dead thing, which helped. He’d left Makkachin to guard both the apartment and his life, and had left for a jog to the rink at dawn.

The path to the club was familiar. His feet knew it better than his head did, even after a year of living at the hot springs and being pampered, his body hadn’t forgotten this routine. He imagined that religion must be what this run felt like, a return to something pure and ethereal. The Art. He felt his mind emptying of real-world concerns, he felt the energy thrumming in his corded muscles. He felt alive by the time he arrived at the sign that proudly proclaimed,  _ “Sports Champions Club.”  _ Below it, on the lauriot wall, a picture of himself and his five-time world champion record. He smiled.

He wondered if Yakov had taken his name down and only replaced it recently, or if he’d kept it up the whole time he was playing coach in Japan. The thought was a quick one, alive then guttering out, flickering with a life as brief as a match. He knew Yakov. His name would have stayed up, even if Victor had never come home again.

A deep breath, to cleanse the thought of coaching, of the warm body in his bed, of the Prix that had shattered both his world records. Now was time for work. For the Art. He opened the front doors wide, and proudly tackled the second huge hurdle of coming back to the competition. Designing the routine.

The lobby was empty at this hour. Victor had always liked this place the best early in the morning or very, very late at night--when it was empty. When his footsteps echoed in either direction and his own heartbeat was the loudest noise. It was peaceful. The fabric of the world seemed thin, with the gray false-dawn outside and the fluorescent lights inside clashing into something with soft focus, like in a movie. Creating a routine was a delicate art, and the odd reality of the early morning, the fantasy of midnight, those were the hours to truly wield genius. 

He was very particular about when he designed routines. He was particular about every aspect, the music and the moves and even the time to practice them, because each routine was a life of its own. The Victor that skated the year before was dead, and a new one rose from the ashes. It was a relentless labor, and before this year he had never tried to mix personal desire with his profession. This would be his first time attempting the art himself, while he was also in love.

How would that change him? Would he be better for it? Yuuri certainly had been, but Yuuri was something special. Not a genius, but he wore an open heart when he performed that brought a routine to life. He had needed that heart to achieve his potential. But Victor had never skated like that.

He found himself in the locker room, without having any memory of how he’d gotten there. His feet were truly on autopilot, a fact he realized with a soft smile at his own expense. He set his duffel bag on the bench, and began moving his belongings back into the locker that had served as his second home for two decades. It still contained the bits and baubles he’d left behind--photos taped to the door, a towel he’d forgotten, a pair of gloves he’d thought he’d lost. He picked the towel up and sniffed it experimentally.

The stench was rank. It  _ had _ been sitting here for a year, he supposed.

Unceremoniously, he tossed it in the trash.

“So you’re really back.”

Georgi, looming in the doorway.

Victor sat on the bench and bent to begin lacing on his skates. It let him hide the sharp displeasure in his eyes at discovering that he did not, in fact, have the building to himself. Victor would have been unhappy at  _ anyone _ , and the boy was entirely too fragile. He would take it personally that Victor didn’t particular want to see his face. And he didn’t have time to bicker.

“It does seem that way, doesn’t it? How interesting,” Victor chirped with a cheer that he did not feel. 

“Yuri said you brought that Japanese pig back with you,” Georgi said. It wasn’t a question.

“Ah, you make it sound like Yurio doesn’t love the idea. He was instrumental in making it happen.” One skate on, Victor moved to the other. It felt good to have them on again. The Grand Prix had left him largely dry-footed, too busy coaching to fit much of his own practice in. “Yuuri is with me, and he will be using the rink.”

Only then, did Victor lift his face and grace Georgi with a pleasant, glowing smile. It was charismatic, the kind of smiling face he offered to his team when they were being particularly brutish. There was an edge on the expression that he reserved for Georgi in particular, because the boy was thick and willfully ignorant of the people around him.

“I hope you will welcome him tomorrow,” he added. “When he shows up here to begin training.”

He heard, rather than saw, Georgi choke on air. He was already walking away, heading towards the ice with a single-minded lust to begin.

“If you’re a coach, you should just  _ stay _ a coach,” Georgi shouted after him. “Give the rest of us a chance to win gold!”

The move from standing, to gliding on the outside edge of his right blade was so smooth, so mechanical, that he felt himself truly breathing for the first time in weeks. His heart began beating, he existed as a single point. Unified.

He spun and gave Georgi a mock salute. “Didn’t you know? The only way to summon me back to the ice is by breaking both my records.”

Of course Georgi had a response to that, but something in Victor’s face made him stop short. He relented, and retreated. Perhaps there were better fights to pick, or perhaps he went off to lick his wounds. Victor didn’t care which. Life outside the rink had ceased to matter the second he took off; Georgi faded to a gray smudge in the backdrop of his grand stage.

For hours, he wrote a story. The sky outside swelled from a lean gray into a brighter dawn. It blushed a vibrant blue, and he continued creating this thing he called his Art. Other skaters began arriving, members of the Russian team. Some were new faces, rising up with Yurio from the junior division. Some were newcomers that had hoped to train in the same rink as Victor. He wondered what last year had been like, all those disappointed faces asking Yakov why their idol was no longer skating under him.

He let the thoughts come, and he let them go. He continued writing his story.

Victor played with the footwork on the free skate he’d internally dubbed ‘ _ Fire, _ ’ which would be the name until he decided on a musical piece. There were already two he’d picked out, and each had its strengths, but neither told exactly the story he was looking for. The second of the two had a full measure of drum beats at the end, launching the skater into an ending pose that would have the audience roaring. It was that sequence that he’d been working on for the past two hours. It was also that sequence that had driven the rest of the team off the ice. He saw Mila still warming up by the side of the rink--on to her second hour of ‘warming up,’ which was bordering on unreasonable. Georgi was lifting weights, one of his known least favorite activities. He saw a few of the other new faces that he hadn’t been introduced to yet also in there with Georgi through the broad bay windows separating the gym and the rink. They all looked content to simply be away from the monster on the ice. Victor hadn’t seen that gym so well-used in years.

And there was not a single soul on the ice but him.

It was amazing that in just one day, he could command the same level of respect that he’d wielded after his fifth consecutive gold. He breathed deep. It was nice to be back.

A long stroke on his right blade carried him across the rink while he coasted on the miasma of half-thoughts surrounding  _ Fire _ . He couldn’t focus, though. Something buzzed just beneath his conscious mind. A ticking…

8:45 rolled around. The Club doors flew open, and Yakov burst forth with that coach charisma. That commanding presence of his. Victor realized his biological clock still remembered his coach’s routine, the on-the-dot punctuality that Yakov lived by. 8:45 came around, and his body knew with a visceral certainty that he had to be in skates and on the ice. Ten years of tension beaten into him by his fire-and-brimstone coach, and he knew when the day began like the crack of a whip. Odd, how even after a year little things like that still stayed with him.

The thought brought a rare, raw smile to his face. Some things had changed, some of the faces here were new, but Yakov would never. He was eternal, like the sun rising. What a gift.

On impulse, perhaps fueled by a surge of nostalgia for the tumultuous relationship he and Yakov had shared for years, Victor launched into a jump. He kept it easy, just a quadruple toe loop, nothing strenuous. Not like the jumps he was known for. The energy took him, burned in his core, shot like lightning down his legs and came out his blades, sending him spinning. He landed strong on his right leg, outside edge. It was a model jump, easy and loose.

“Vitya you are banned from quads for two weeks, we talked about this!” Yakov erupted.

He saw Yurio lacing up in the corridor behind Yakov. They must have come in together. His time with the ice to himself was coming to an end, it seemed. Mila was beginning to look quite impatient anyway, he was sure he couldn’t glare her off the ice much longer. Instead of moving to the side of the rink to greet his coach, Victor continued weaving movements for the program. He had a few precious minutes left before Yurio came trumpeting over with all the grace of an elephant. He could finish the routine.

The jump...what if the jump was a flip instead? No, too close to Yuuri’s feat at the Prix. A combination?

Yakov must’ve sensed the air on him, because he showed an uncommon willingness to postpone the lecture as Victor launched into the last step sequence once more. He wove in and out, skates flashing in the sunlight that had finally reached lazily in through the ceiling-side windows. He could feel it, the driving beat of the drum in him.

He tried the combo. A quadruple loop, followed by a triple flip. The landing wasn’t quite as a tidy as the first had been, and the flip fought him. He landed, wobbled, but kept moving. 

That was the line, he knew. Yakov wouldn’t keep his mouth shut after that one. He counted down internally to the explosion while he began working through the step sequence again, ironing out the clumsiness half-way in between an S-curve and a flip. 

“Vitya, you’ve been skating less than  _ me _ for a  _ year!”  _ Victor turned, skated with his back to Yakov to hide the impish smile. There is was, the explosion. This man never changed. “You must go about this  _ properly _ or you will hurt yourself! You’re not twenty anymore. If you are injured now, you won’t win the gold again! Do you understand--are you listening to me?  _ Vitya! _ ”

Yakov looked a bit like an angry gnome, the sort that you left food for on the stoop during the night in the hopes that they would bring good luck or clean your kitchen. It was an odd thought, one that he batted away before it could threaten his focus. It was already hard, with Yakov shouting.

Now mostly out of pure stubbornness, he began running through the whole skate one more time, from the top.

“Don’t you skate away from me, I’m your  _ coach _ Vitya! Do you  _ want _ to end the season laid up with a broken leg, is that it? You  _ want _ surgery to force a retirement? Come over here! Listen to your coach,  _ for once!” _

There was a metronome that moved from one side of Victor’s head to the other, pulsed at perfect white-bright intervals to the beat of this imaginary song, this story he wanted to tell. He’d sketched this particular routine out in his head already, mulled it over while Yuuri slept on his chest last night, and now it was just about making it possible. Making it human. Each step obeyed that metronome beating in his chest, let him arrange the step sequence like a puzzle from the pieces he had figured out over the course of his practice this morning. 

This was usually quite a natural thing for him, the creation. Stringing steps and jumps along like pearls, beautiful and elegant. But Yakov’s incessant rambling was already choking his progress, sour notes over the landscape of his art. He glided to a stop in the center of the rink, arms limp at his sides. He did not hide his distaste. The look he shot Yakov was unmasked and sharp.

Georgi and Mila, both standing behind Yakov, abruptly had something else to be doing. They did not make eye contact with Victor has they evacuated to the other side of the rink. Yakov held his ground, to his credit. Victor expected nothing less of the single human he’d trusted to coach him. He did not settle, not when it came to the art, and neither did Yakov.

That much, at least, they had in common.

A deep, cleansing breath. Get rid of it, Vitya. Shelve it. The sharp edges didn’t help him now.

He moved to the side of the rink, face-to-face with his coach. “You’re fussing, Yakov.”

Yakov crossed his arms over his thick chest, scowl rooted to his face. “You pay me to fuss, Vitya. You also pay me to help you win.”

Victor laughed, shrugged, and skated away. “Go be Yurio’s coach, I think our fairy needs more attention than little old me,” he sing-songed. Yuri made a noise suspiciously close to a cat’s indignant hiss, and Victor laughed harder. “Don’t you, Yurio? You’re going up against me next season! It’s everything you wanted!”

Something tart and muffled was verbally launched his way, but Victor was already ignoring them both. Maybe Yakov would take his suggestion, maybe he would continue to stand there and harp. He was still not satisfied with this sequence he was writing, and nothing was going to stop him from completing it. Not the team, not his coach-- _ no one _ .

Except, maybe, for his phone ringing. But  _ only _ because it was the specific song he’d set for Yuuri’s ringtone.

He U-turned and headed off the ice, which caught Yakov short. He clomped past Yakov to where he’d stashed his tissues and cell phone on the bench without a second glance, which only aggravated the man. He swiped his thumb across the screen to pick the call up, heart already in his throat. “Yuuri, you’re up!”

“Mmm, where’d you go?” Yuuri hadn’t been up for very long, judging by his groggy tone. The poor boy handled jetlag worse than any skater he’d ever met. They practically lived on an airplane for the season, moving from city to city, never in the same timezone. Yuuri was almost twenty-four and still handled it like a skater brand-new to the Prix.

Victor hummed. “The rink.”

“Oh.” A static rustle. He could hear Makkachin barking in the background. “...I think Makkachin wants to go out.”

He sat down on the bench, just to make it clear to Yakov that he could stop hovering now. This could take a while. “The leash is somewhere by the door. Oh, I saved half of breakfast, it’s in the fridge.”

Yuuri made that pleased cooing noise that he only did when he was sleepy or inebriated, the one that reminded Victor of a child in a toy store. “You didn’t have to--”

He laughed. “It’s only takeout, don’t get too excited. Also, your luggage should be arriving today. They might come before I get back.”

“Yeah, I can let them in.” More rustling. Victor knew the sound of Makkachin’s aggressive affection anywhere. “Ah! Okay, okay, I’m moving! You want to go out, I know!” A few thumps, a muffled  _ thud _ . “Ow. I’m gonna take Makkachin out. I’ll see you when you get home!”

The line went dead. Victor let out a happy, held little breath and put the phone down.

When he looked up, he found that he’d gathered an audience. Yakov, Mila, and Yurio were all staring at him. There was a spectrum of emotion in his audience, too; Mila, looking something close to delighted, Yurio, looking like he was about to vomit, and Yakov gone seven shades past just  _ annoyed _ . 

“So it  _ is _ true!” Mila broke the silence first, glee written all over her face. “Yuuri got into that cold heart of yours! Let me see the ring!”

“It’s  _ gross _ ,” Yurio grumbled. 

Happily, Victor obliged her. The ring glinted gold and welcoming, pure and real. Mila gasped, like she didn’t believe it was real even after seeing it on television. Yakov cleared his throat, breaking the spell. He grabbed Victor by the elbow and began hauling him toward his office in the back. “I need a moment alone with Vitya. Yuri, find Georgi and start warmups. Mila, don’t you have a routine to be working on?”

A chorus of ‘yes, coach.’ Victor watched them leave in quiet awe. When had Yuri been so obedient? That was very new. He allowed himself to be hauled off to the office without comment, after that. He’d known it was coming. It was one of the reasons he’d come in a day ahead of Yuuri. He was aiming to get the bloodshed out of the way, because Yuuri deserved a team that was going to welcome him. It was his job today to make sure that happened.

It meant convincing Yakov that this was best. He’d begun the process at the Prix, but Yakov had largely dodged him under the guise of Yuri’s performance. Now there was no performance hanging between them, and inside the protection of the office there was no one to interrupt.

“Yakov, you should really watch the bursts of anger in your old age. It’s not good for the blood pressure,” Victor commented dryly. His coach’s face hadn’t stopped being red since they left the rinkside.

“And you should take some advice from your sixteen-year-old self and keep the comments to when I  _ can’t _ hear you,” Yakov bit back. “You  _ used  _ to know better. You learned your lesson.”

The path behind the bleachers, along the back wall to the narrow metal door was familiar. Up the stairs, just as natural. The steps were mesh steel and he used to watch the floor shrink further and further away when he was younger, climbing the same steps as a child that he did now. He’d started training with Yakov at twelve. He’d been fanciful, imaginative. Escapism was powerful in the hands of a brilliant creature. The walk to Yakov’s office was sometimes the path to a hidden treasure, sometimes it was a dragon’s lair. Once upon a time, when he’d been stuck on a program, he would come back here and imagine a story in this corridor. It helped him think.

They paused at the door while Yakov fought with the lock. Victor stared at the cement walls high above their heads, lost in contemplation.

“You know I value your advice. You  _ are _ the only coach for me.” Victor tilted his head and watched Yakov fight the lock. He needed to get it replaced, honestly, but that Russian thick-headedness mandated that the lock be well and truly broken before replacing it. Utilitarianism. They all had it.

Yakov grunted at him.

“Is it about the quads?” Victor sighed, leashing his temper. “Fine, I’ll lay off them for a week.”

“Vitya, I know what you’re after.” The locked clicked and the door swung inward. Victor watched the old man’s retreating back for a long moment before he followed him inside the office. “You were bored as a skater. You’re bored as a coach. You think that if you do both, you’ll find a challenge.”

The office was the only reason Victor knew that Yakov had any kind of emotional connection to his skaters, sometimes. As a child, he had reminded himself of the walls hung with photos taken of Russian skaters on podiums, of Russian skaters during competitions and practice. Yakov was a legend in his own way, having taught an entire generation of Russian skaters. The whole Russian team looked to him as their coach, and they had for  _ years _ . Longer than the decade Victor had been training under him, and that was no small feat. And even during the worst of Yakov’s temper, Victor had been able to see the adoration on these walls. As a child, it had been a comfort.

Now, he wondered if that tendency would end their professional relationship. That fierce need to protect the talent from even skaters themselves; it had allowed Yakov to train geniuses. Now it could make him lose one.

“Coaching isn’t about me being bored,” he corrected. He took a brief tour around the office to look at the same photos he’d been staring at for years, idling at each photo that he remembered. It was nostalgic. It was calming.

Yakov sat down behind his desk. The chair squeaked under his weight. Another thing that had been the same for years; Yakov never oiled his chair and the squeak could be heard all the way down on the rink. It was easy to know when the coach was coming down to scold someone, because of that squeak. Like trumpets announcing his presence long before he made his entrance. “Then what is it? You lost your inspiration, and ran off to Japan. Sounds like boredom to me.” 

“Tell me, Yakov. How many other five-time world champions have you coached?” He asked the question while he perused photos on the wall, careful not to look at Yakov.

A quiet growl. “...Just you, Vitya. There’s no one else like you on the ice.”

He hummed, pleased and preening. “I thought you knew better than to compare me to other skaters. On  _ and  _ off the ice.”

They made eye contact briefly, when Victor tossed a glance over his shoulder and shot Yakov one of his charming little smiles. It was the sort that he reserved for his fans, usually. They tended to just piss his coach off. Then he went back to the walls, more interested in the photos than he was in Yakov’s expression.

“Then what is it?” Yakov asked. “If it’s not boredom, why are you coaching?”

He’d found a photo of himself at nineteen. Long silver hair bound up in braids, oddly similar to Yurio’s hair for his gold-winning Prix performance. He recognized where he’d seen it before, now. Long fingers weaving braids as quickly as she scolded, a tart woman and calculating eyes. He’d only dealt with her a handful of times before the divorce papers went through. 

“How is Lilia? I didn’t have a chance to say hello during the Prix.” He didn’t have to look at Yakov to know the raw irritation that comment would bring to the surface. “She looked the same. Healthy, I hope.”

“What are you after, Vitya?” Yakov growled.

“You love her.” Victor turned from the photographs and leveled his best poker face at his coach. Not the smile he usually hid behind. Something much sharper. “Isn’t that why you asked her to choreograph Yurio’s program?”

Yakov flushed a red as thick as borsch. “The reason I asked her to help with Yuri has  _ nothing _ to do with my personal feelings.”

“Ah. But do you ever think about what it would have been like, if it had?”

A thick silence leveled itself. Yakov wasn’t sure what to do with this revelation, and he could see the gears turning behind that scowl. It was only Victor’s opening move on this chess game, and he already had Yakov off-balance. He took advantage of it, like the ruthless chess player that he was.

He approached the desk. Years ago, this had been intimidating. He had been scolded at this desk for  _ hours _ , and Yakov’s hardwood desktop with its leather folders and professional-looking lamp were all part of a carefully measured exterior Yakov built for the single purpose of intimidation. But Victor was much older now, and the game was very different. “All I ask is for a chance to prove that this is good for me, Yakov. Let me train Yuuri here, and allow  _ me _ to train here. If I fail at Nationals, then I will reconsider my plan.” 

The noise that came out of Yakov sounded like a forgotten tea kettle. He wondered, not for the first time, if his coach wasn’t just actually a hot air balloon. It was fanciful, but just the distraction he needed. 

“You’re an idiot, and you’re going to hurt yourself. Then you’ll  _ have _ to be a coach, so maybe it’s what you need.” Yakov shook his head. “Fine. I’ll play along, but you  _ never _ bring Lilia up again.”

Victor beamed at him. “Deal.”

He turned to leave.

“Victor.”

Something in Yakov’s voice pressed down on his chest and slid cold down his spine. He turned. “Coach?”

There were a thousand other things Yakov wanted to be talking about, it was written all over his face. His coach had a peculiar way of tightening his lips and jutting his bottom jaw forward when he was uncomfortable. “We will have to discuss strategies. Remember last time.”

He clucked his tongue. Victor was very good at playing pretend, and he pretended he wasn’t terrified now. It was the easiest thing in the world to shrug, and toss his head as if he could ignore the problem entirely. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Coach!”

_ Both of us. _

  
  
  



	2. Spoons and Things

The next box that he hefted onto the counter was triple-taped and labeled with his mother’s writing. It read _‘Kitchen things,_ ’ scrawled in her tidy kanji. Yuuri punctured the tape with the worn pair of scissors he’d found in a bottom drawer several hours ago, and pulled the box open the rest of the way.

“Aw, Mom I told you that I didn’t need all this…” Yuuri reached in and pulled out not one, but _two_ sets of silverware. Nothing cheap, either. These would last him a good ten years if they were cleaned and kept properly. “I feel like I’m moving in after a bridal shower.”

Or a wedding, more accurately. When the delivery had arrived, Yuuri had signed for twice as many boxes as he’d packed back in Hasetsu. He hadn’t asked what the extras were at the time--the delivery man seemed just as bewildered as Yuuri was--but he’d made a mental note to call his parents and ask as soon as it was a reasonable time in Japan. He’d been opening them since, and discovering that his parents had outfitted him to move into a _new house_ with his fiance, not just move into Victor’s apartment _with_ him.

It was off-putting. But more importantly, he didn’t know where he was going to _store_ half the stuff. Why did he have two sets of silverware? Wouldn’t Victor just have his own? He already felt weird moving in with Victor. He didn’t want to overburden and move too much _stuff_ in. What if Victor thought it was too much? He should have denied the boxes at delivery.

What if Victor had second thoughts about them moving in together, after he came home to a living room stuffed with boxes? He’d been able to get through most of them, but there were still half a dozen hefty stacks of unidentified luggage and he’d been hoping to be completely moved in before Victor came home. It was such a terrible thing to come home to! And the apartment had been nice and clean before the delivery arrived. He felt something close to a child caught drawing all over the walls in marker. He should have had this cleaned up by now, he’d done nothing but unpack _all day_. Was he going too slow?

Yuuri realized with a slow, sick start, that he’d been staring at the silverware for a solid five minutes. He huffed, set the box down and went in search for his jacket. Makkachin whined at him as he prowled by, and he absently gave the dog a pat. “Want to go on a run?” The dog yipped in agreement. It would help ease his thoughts, and then he’d re-focus himself once he came back and blast through the rest of the boxes. There was still a way to salvage all this--

The lock on the front door clicked open. Yuuri froze in the corridor, staring at the open bedroom door. He could see his coat hanging on the doorknob, where he’d left it after his morning run. _He’ll see the livingroom_ , his head whispered. _He hates you now_.

Footsteps. Makkachin’s bark, and Victor’s laughter. Then an exhausted sigh that wasn’t quite quiet enough, no matter how Victor tried stifling it.

 _He’s tired and my boxes are on the couch_.

“I’m home!” Victor announced.

 _He can’t even relax, I’m awful_.

He was doing it again. Yuuri consciously forced himself to breathe evenly, and finished the journey to the bedroom door. He plucked up his jacket and pulled it on. “Welcome home!” It took some focus, but he got his tongue cooperating with him again. That was good.

The zipper wasn’t being as helpful as his tongue was, though. Yuuri scowled at his fingers while he tried to feed the bottom tooth of the zipper through, but his hands were shaking and the coat was unwieldy in his grip. Arms snaked around his waist, a warm wall of strength pressed against his back. He stopped dead.

“Aw, are you going out?” Victor gave him that mock-whine, the one that sent a shiver down his spine no matter how many times he heard it. The lips touching his earlobe weren’t helping the matter. “I just got home. Come have dinner with me.”

Yuuri meant to pull away, but those arms were so inviting. He didn’t have the heart to break contact, not when Victor’s hands were so cold against his stomach. Didn’t he wear gloves? He wanted to pull Victor to the couch and sit with him until his fingers were just a little less like ice, but then he remembered that his boxes were all over the couch-- _still_ \--and he remembered why he’d wanted to pull away in the first place.

“I just--I’m just going on a quick run,” Yuuri mumbled. “I won’t be long. If you want to set up the dishes for dinner? I’ll be back before you know it.” He forwent the zipper, the hat, the gloves. He turned and tried to move past Victor toward the door, head in a blind panic.

Victor caught him, long arms and an inescapable gravity. He was staring at Victor’s chest for a solid few seconds before his brain caught up to what had happened and realized he wasn’t, in fact, outside the apartment.

“Victor…” he mumbled, face buried in the chest in front of him.

“Mmm.” A few quiet movements, lips brushing over the tender skin of his temple, moving strands of hair out of the way. “Yuuri, you’re not telling me something. I’m your coach, aren’t I?”

He stopped short. He had a choice here, and he knew it. Victor’s grip had loosened on him, and Yuuri was certain that if he tried to run now, Victor would let him go. But if he ran, he would make no progress forward. And that was one thing he had learned with Victor that he cherished above all else; he _could_ open up, he _could_ meet Victor half-way. It was hard, and he didn’t think that would ever change. But he _wanted_ to do it.

Yuuri sucked in a deep breath, and nodded. “Come with me.”

He led Victor through the apartment by the hand, and showed him the box on the counter. Wordlessly he stared at it until Victor approached to look inside. “Ah. Kitchen utensils.” Blue eyes looked at him, wry. It was that infinite patience Victor had for him, that sense that no, he did not understand. But he wanted to.

He wanted to shrivel up. He felt it happening on the inside, in his gut. This was stupid and he knew this fact very well, but he forged onward because Victor was _waiting_ for it now.  “My mom sent me some extra stuff. A _lot_ of extra stuff. It’s _too_ much.”

Metal clanging on metal. His head shot up, he stared at Victor’s hands without understanding. Was Victor--putting the silverware away? Cautiously, he approached Victor’s side. He saw inside the drawer for the first time, and he saw Victor neatly laying the spoons his mother had sent inside. There didn’t seem to be anything else inside the drawer, just dust and some odd-end measuring cups.

“They’re...empty?” He didn’t understand. Hadn’t Victor been living in the same apartment for over a decade?

“Would you believe me if I told you I’d been using plastic utensils this whole time?” Victor asked. His smile was serene while he calmly sorted forks and chopsticks into the grooves built into the drawer.

Yuuri was beginning to understand that the serene smile hid things Victor did not want to discuss. It was a slow-growing realization, a hunch he’d been working on for the past few weeks. For a long time he couldn’t understand the distance in that smile; it was only at the Grand Prix that he was able to peek beneath that mask. He understood the significance, now.

Just because he understood that it hid _something_ , didn’t mean he knew what it was.

“That doesn’t feel very much like home.” He tilted his head and watched Victor out of the corner of his eye. He watched for the storm in his eyes, and when he was sure the waters were clear he reached out and placed a hand on Victor’s. The contact was lingering, and unassuming.

“Then we should be thanking your mother.” Victor placed the last knife of the set into the drawer, set the box aside and gestured grandly at his work. It was a false cheer that didn't quite reach his eyes, but it was heartening all the same. For slightly different reasons, perhaps. “Look at that. _That_ is a home. For forks, that is.” A smooth grin. “You said there was _more?_ I have to say, this is the most _helpful_ problem you could have found, Katsudon.”

Of course Victor wouldn’t see it. But--and this was the thing, with Victor--Yuuri didn’t feel weak for having mentioned it to him. In fact, Victor seemed determined to rationalize with his fears, rather than just dismissing them. It was one of the reasons Yuuri felt like he could open his mouth in the first place, after so many years of clamping down on the irrational thoughts and rushing anxieties.

And he didn’t tell Victor because he was his coach. No, it was something else. He didn’t feel _weak_ with Victor, it just felt like another run-of-the-mill obstacle to tackle. His mother had sent him too many boxes, and now Victor was going to find a place to put _all_ of it. It was so easy, so gentle.

How did he end up with Victor? What had he done to deserve a gift like this? First it had been like living with a god, and now he was living with a man that sometimes knew him better than he knew himself. None of it seemed like anything he deserved, after his catastrophic fall from grace just two years ago. He still felt odd wearing the silver he’d won at the Prix two weeks ago. He stared at it and wondered if they’d meant to give it to someone else, someone far more deserving of it.

But no. Victor had _chosen_ him. They’d chosen _each other_. Yuuri reminded himself that this was his.

“Yuuri.”

He blinked back to reality. Victor’s nose was hovering a few centimeters from his own. He yelped. “Sorry. I--um. Did you say something?”

Victor grinned. This close, he smelled like a bright cologne and frost off the winter streets. Light caught the chapstick still glossy on his bottom lip, drawing Yuuri’s eye, magnetic. The creature staring out at him had that hunger, the sort that lit a heat inside Yuuri, deep and smoldering. He recognized that look, and there was a playfulness to it. What would happen if he had the courage to rise up to that? “I asked you to show me the other boxes.”

“Right.” There was no stopping the blush that worked its way up to his cheeks. “They’re on the couch. Most of them.”

Victor led him by the hand, their fingers interlaced. The ring on Victor’s finger pressed against his palm and just the thought of it was thick and heavy. He still hadn’t adjusted to it. It had only been a handful of weeks, and most of the time he’d spent in a hectic haze of preparing a move to another continent. Now that the move was over, he was left wondering if it had all been too fast. How did he know when he was ready for this kind of step?

He’d brought too many boxes. _Obviously_ he wasn’t ready for this. But he was already twenty four! When _would_ he be ready? And he’d already moved out once--this wasn’t such a big deal.

In the lounge, standing in front of the couch he’d seen on magazine spreads, it dawned on him why this felt so strange.

“I used to follow magazine articles about you. Um. Not in a creepy way, I just--” his mouth snapped shut. He tried again. “I guess I just...have seen photos of this apartment. And all these boxes don’t belong in those photos.”

The largest box sitting on the couch was already open, and Victor was ruffling through it with the sort of glee that was more common with children and birthday presents. The photo comment gave him pause, though. He shot Yuuri a look. “Well, we have to put your things _away_ , _then_ they’ll belong in a photo.”

Something about the way Victor reached out and brushed his cheek spoke the words _trust me_. And Yuuri did. A few steadying breaths and he dropped the line of thinking in favor of the pure physical activity of unpacking the remaining boxes together. It wasn’t quite as good as jogging, and Makkachin was looking very betrayed at being shorted a walk, but it meant staying inside and warm and with Victor while he marveled at the full set of oven mitts his mother had included with the rest of the ‘gifts.’

Part of the joy of the moment, he decided, was seeing Victor’s reaction to some of the items. His excitement at the silverware, his awe at the framed family photos. He found the poodle-print scarf that Yuuri had worn in highschool, and Yuuri wondered how it had even been packed, but Victor thought it was the cutest thing he’d ever seen. And it was the tiny reactions like that, that eased the anxiety over how _much_ there was. He could almost forget the horror at the number of boxes, when Victor was wearing that stupid scarf around his neck.

And, most amazingly, Yuuri watched all the boxes on the couch vanish. Yuuri barely followed where it all went. A lot of it was kitchenware, pots and pans and a rice cooker with a note taped to the front that read _‘so you can make Vicchan pork cutlet bowls while you’re away.’_ Yuuri had never been much of a cook, but she’d included a recipe and maybe it wasn’t _that_ impossible. The kitchen looked better, too. More lived in. The geometrically pleasing shelves had plates and pans on them now. There were appliances on the counter--something other than the lone microwave.

“Dinner now!” Victor chirped, at the end of it. He began unpacking the bag he’d brought home, a hat trick of takeout containers that managed to cover the whole island counter, despite the illogically small proportions of the bag itself.

Yuuri continued to marvel at the kitchen for a moment longer while Victor set out the food. There weren’t any photos from before the championships. Maybe he wasn’t much of a photo person, but that seemed like a strange thing. Victor liked to preen. And just--it was the silverware. Of all the strange things he’d discovered about Victor’s living habits and day-to-day life, for some reason the oddest thing to him was that Victor seemed to have nothing from before a few years ago. No hand-me-downs, no old photos. No silverware from his mother, the way Yuuri had silverware from his.

No mention of his family at championships.

An old, old hunch. From back in his fan days, when he used to follow articles about Victor and watch his social media like a hawk. It had been one of those fan-theories, on a forum board dedicated to figure skating. Where did Victor come from? What was his life from before? Some theories on parentage, but nothing confirmed. Were they dead? Was he disowned? No one seemed to know.

He was glad that impossibly, his presence here had brought a sense of home. Lived-in. But he couldn’t keep himself from wondering.

“Yuuri.” Victor was handing him a bowl of something warm that smelled wonderful. It also smelled...familiar? It snapped Yuuri’s attention back from his wandering thoughts.

“Is that miso soup?” He accepted the bowl and brought it up to investigate. It was indeed miso; the warm aroma was a nostalgic one. It reminded him of home, of cold winters and watching snowfall from the onsen windows. He cradled his close. “Where did you find it?”

Victor’s smile was self-satisfied and feline. He opened the paper-wrapped chopsticks sent with the food and began placing food from the various containers into his bowl. “I found a Japanese restaurant that’s on the way to the rink and wanted to try it. They have bento boxes too! We can try them tomorrow.”

The spread looked amazing, and he was surprised there were _any_ Japanese-style restaurants in St. Petersburg, let alone ones that were authentic. But most of all, Victor went out to _find_ one.

He smiled, leaned up on his toes and pecked Victor’s cheek. Quiet and chaste, like most of his kisses. “Thank you.” What was it thanks for? He wasn’t sure. For the food, maybe. Or for the way Victor had handled his fears about the boxes, the way he hadn’t scolded him for it being stupid. Or maybe it was just thanks for being who he was, and being in this apartment with him.

Victor opened his mouth to respond--judging by the heat in his eyes, it was going to be something that would have Yuuri’s face going red--but a cell phone buzz cut him off. He frowned, fished in his pocket for his phone, and pulled it out. “Huh. A text from Mila.”

Yuuri began dishing himself out a plate of the food while Victor began typing on his phone. “What did she say?”

“Channel 12 is running a story about my return right now.” Victor set his bowl on the counter, moved to the other side of the island and went digging in the couch cushions for the remote. Once found, he turned the tv on with it. “She says I need to see it.”

The newshead was a woman in her mid-forties, sitting in a prim pantsuit speaking in Russian. Yuuri knew enough sparse Russian to navigate the streets, but not nearly enough to keep up with her. A few photos of Victor moved across screen, mostly from the end of the Prix when he was serving as a coach. A few of them were candid shots alongside Yuuri, and he had to force down the reactive embarrassment. Then a newer photo, from today--? It was Victor outside of the rink, talking to Mila. It didn’t look like the kind of photo either of them had been asked permission to take.

“Is she talking about your comeback?” Yuuri asked. He knew she was talking about the upcoming season--he caught key phrases like ‘Russian Nationals,’ and free skate, and a shot of the Grand Prix’s winners.

Victor grunted. He’d landed on the couch, food forgotten on the counter, and was watching the television screen with a transfixed fascination. Yuuri resigned himself to a recap after the bit was over, and went to sit beside him. He left both bowls of food on the table, and now that it was out and he could smell it, his stomach was growling.

He flinched when the newscaster said his name. He looked up at the screen reflexively, knowing he wasn’t going to like what he saw.

He was right, of course. Media never failed to horrify.

“Why am I on tv?” he asked Victor. He strained to listen to the words tumbling out of her mouth. His hold on the language was weak, slippery. It took focus, but the video footage of his run this morning buzzed on the inside of his skull. “What’s going on? Why do they show this? Why do they care?”

Victor had fallen back to a desolate stillness, glacial in the way he watched the television. “Shh. Let me listen.” His voice was kind, even if his eyes were not.

The piece went on for several minutes. Some kind of feature length bit on the Prix skaters, according to the splash page that came up when the program cut for advertisements.

Victor muted the television and turned to Yuuri. He began retelling with a voice that was automatic, his thoughts far away. The mask was coming back up, now, but Yuuri had seen beneath it and they both knew it. Victor hardly bothered with it, anymore. “She was asking, rather gleefully, if both coaching you and skating competitively will be too much to handle for a man of my age. Then they showed their stalker footage, and she pointed out that you were wearing my coat on your jog, and speculated about the significance.”

He felt his face heating up and hated it. “I didn’t mean to. I thought it was mine and it was so early--”

“No, I quite like it. Keep doing that.” Victor reached out and brushed a finger over his bottom lip like he was studying marble. His accent got thicker, voice rougher. “You are  _zolotse_. They should know. Let them wonder.”

It was hard not to squirm under the look, under that touch and the way Victor chewed away at the space between them until they were flush, thigh-to-thigh. Yuuri leaned into it, couldn’t help himself. There was a certain gravity, a certain excitement that was hard to understand while he was still reeling from being on the television so casually. Competitions were one thing, but this was his _daily life_. Something about the news had Victor riled, too. Was he angry? Or-

Victor’s lips pressed down on his, and his thoughts flatlined for a minute. Existence became a series of muddle feelings. Lips, a tongue brushing against him. Leaning into it, wrapping his arm around Victor’s neck to keep him. Fingers weaving through the hair at the base of his skull, angling his head, wielding a quiet kind of certainty. It was the easiest thing imaginable, just to relax into that confidence and let it carry him. He let that tongue slip in past his lips and tried to navigate the messy results.

Then his thoughts caught up with him, collided with the back of his head like ice on a bad fall. He understood what they were doing, where Victor’s hands were, where _his_ hands were, and realized this was _terrifying_ . He pulled back reflexively, a knee-jerk reaction. Victor let him go. On some level, it felt like he’d expected it. He knew he was so red he was glowing, and he knew there was a discomfort growing along his thigh that wasn’t going to stay hidden very long. Somehow, that terrified him even _more_.

“Um. H-hang on. Be right back. Promise!” He needed the cold! He needed to be outside, he needed to run. The thought stemmed from the animal fear; it chased him off the couch and into the kitchen. It was in his fingers when he grabbed his coat off the chair and wrapped it around his shoulders. It threw him out the door into the stairwell.

He could hear Victor calling his name, but he couldn’t stop.

  



	3. Prism

“Take Makkachin with you!” Victor sent the dog after the closing door, and Makkachin was more than willing to take a late night jog. He followed the sound of the pup’s toenails clicking on tile until he was sure Makkachin made it out before the door shut.

He looked around.

In the immediate aftermath of Yuuri’s retreat, the room felt muffled. Too still. Did he follow? What was the best move to make, when Yuuri got like this?

...Let him come back, it always boiled down to patience. Yuuri would tire of running from himself eventually, and they would be able to talk about it. That’s how Yuuri had functioned back in Hasetsu. He hoped the rules stayed the same here.

He sighed. The brief frustration faded when he realized the news had come back on. He unmuted the television because he was a glutton for punishment and he wanted to see the interview, and he desperately wanted to be thinking about something else. Had he been too pushy with the kiss? Yuuri scared easily. It had been a bad idea, born of desperation and some emotion that Victor didn’t want to name, the wreckage of an old disaster that he’d rather ignore because now he had Yuuri and Yuuri’s love was enough to sustain him.

The interview had begun on-screen. He re-focused. The interviewer was prim and proper, with a pressed pantsuit and properly Russian jawline. “We’re here now with Andrei Sokolov, retired coach of the FSF in Moscow,” she began. “Andrei, what are your thoughts on Victor’s revolutionary career decision this season?”

Andrei was a familiar face. An old coach, to some of his dearest rivals. He’d grown out his beard since retiring from the business. Those green razor edge eyes were just as pointed as he remembered from Nationals, though. Some things would never change. “Well, as you’ve said, this is a first--both for Nikiforov, and the nation’s figure skating team. Never before has an active competitor also served as a coach to what most would argue would be his direct rival, a silver-winning foreign skater. His decision asks the sort of questions we’ve never had to ask before.”

His countrymen were his oldest fans; he felt a certain loyalty to them, even if they did not often see eye-to-eye. Victor was capable of unconditional love for them; he felt it even when he hated being back here. It was the strange, sick feeling that came with the betrayal. He knew it was coming--the _issue_ . The _tendency_ that he’d been so careful not to mention in recent years, that he was now all but shouting to the world. A tendency that the majority of the world was now perfectly fine with, but _Russia..._

“What would some of those questions be, Mr. Sokolov?” the interviewer asked.

“Well, it simply seems like it would be too much stress, and Mr. Nikiforov is nearly twenty-eight.” The statement was said with some measure of disdain. Andrei was entirely too pleased with himself for calling out a national hero. “That is the obvious concern, of course. It’s a conflict of interest as well, because he will have far more knowledge of a foreign skater’s program than a competitor should. Will we see Nikiforov at his full potential this coming season?”

Victor rolled his eyes. _You keep wondering, Andrei_.

“Many of his long-time fans are claiming that his moving in with Katsuri indicates a broader relationship between the two. Do you have any comments on this?” And there is was, that particular landmine. He knew it was going to come up. It was all over the proverbial streets of figure skating, it might as well be on national news here.

Suddenly, poignantly, Victor wished Yuuri had another way of working off stress besides running. Hasetsu was safe. St. Petersburg was not. He was alone at night and there was a special featuring their relationship airing on channel 12. It was not the best night to be running.

“I think that Nikiforov should remember the ‘09 debacle.”

 _The ‘09 debacle_.

The room shifted sickeningly around him, tilted on an axis he couldn’t see. He felt unbalanced, which was not something that Victor Nikiforov felt very often. He hated the way Andrei was staring at the camera, like he knew Victor was watching. He hated the vapid way the interviewer was letting him get away with comments like that, he hated the fact that they just let this fossil come on television and talk about issues he had no part in.

But he kept watching. Because he was a glutton for punishment, and just hearing that year was enough to make him ache.

“...and there are certain tendencies that have no place in the public eye,” Andrei continued.  
“Whether he likes it or not, he is a national hero and should respect himself and his country and choose to rise above such influences.”

“Just to be clear--you are referring to the possible homosexual relationship between Katsuri and Nikiforov?”

“ _Possible?_ They are _entirely_ too public for common decency. And there are laws to consider. Perhaps abroad he was allowed more freedom, but he is now back with the Russian team and will be expected to uphold a certain morality. It’s the _legality_ of it, you understand.”

Legality, of course. He only mentioned it because of its _legality_ . He only cared because he didn’t want to see a renowned public figure run into _legal_ trouble for his personal choices. Abruptly, Victor didn’t know how he would explain this to Yuuri, had Yuuri stayed. So maybe it was best that he was running. He knew he couldn’t keep the anger off his face. It was there, inside of him, beating bloody and hot. This hatred for the country he loved, this dual-force confusion as the country that had raised him turned its back on something he had been since birth. St. Petersburg was his _home_ . It had been for _years_ . He wanted Yuuri to see the best of it, not this... _this_.

“And what about Katsuri’s role in all this?”

“As a skater, he is very promising. But he--”

Victor abruptly turned the television off. They could talk about Victor, and Victor’s past, and drag his laundry out for the whole nation’s viewing pleasure, but he wouldn’t sit and listen to them talk about Yuuri. It sparked his anger like nothing else, real and raw. He did not feel _real_ anger very often; he was mild, a creature that was carefully held in a measured balance. He had learned how to behave very early, and he had grown into that mask, and things like true anger and true hatred had faded into the background.

When all he had was his work, his _art,_ why would he be angry at _people?_ People simply existed to enjoy his art, and to appreciate the beauty he brought into being. But his life was no longer just his art, it had become _so much more_ . In Hasetsu, new pieces had fit into the puzzle. It was somewhere foreign and bright and _new_ , and he reinvented himself where no one knew who he was _supposed_ to be. Playing coach had brought a new Victor to life. And this Victor loved Yuuri, and Yuuri loved him. So this Victor was not someone he could throw away at the end of the season, like he’d done so many times before. For the first time in his life, there was someone that cared about who he was off the ice so much that he could no longer simply destroy himself through the off-season like he was so accustomed to doing.

That hadn’t mattered until now. But now they were back in a country that knew him, expected certain things of him. He had to figure out how to reconcile who he was now, with the rest of himself that he’d left behind.

Because Victor Nikiforov existed in pieces.

He was light scattered from a prism on the wall, all fractions and gradients. Slices of a reality, stitched together. Diamond with its facets, pressurized to be beautiful under seventy hundred thousand pounds of muck.

He wasn’t actually a person, not deep down.

But he was smart, he was clever. A long time ago, he learned to mimic an ideal that Yakov had laid out to him. It had been a cruel, utilitarian thing when it became clear that he would methodically destroy himself otherwise, and it had worked so well that everyone forgot he was just playing pretend. They’d started with a mutual dream, of seeing Victor win the championship, and Victor had sacrificed for it. Now he was something else running around in the clothes of a prince, and he _looked_ like a prince, so why wouldn’t people believe him? If he walked right, and talked right, no one noticed.

And those people _loved_ him. He loved those people. He loved their eyes, their laughter. He wanted their eyes on him, a desperate hungry part of himself that drank in the spotlight like sustenance. He cultivated that love, because it fed his persona, and it was that part of himself that usually knew what to do when Yuuri ran out of the room, it was that part of him that had eased Yuuri over the months into something resembling a romance. That fraction of him was _experienced_.

The smiling, unworried, people-loving Victor decided Yuuri still wasn’t ready to open up to arousal yet, and he would come around eventually. It was best to let him run it off, and not to stress about it; he would be safe with Makkachin. He was making unnecessary trouble for himself by thinking that he shouldn’t have let Yuuri go, or by thinking that this news special would drastically change something about their lives. People _here_ , in St. Petersburg--they weren’t the talking heads on the television. They didn’t think like that. There was _nothing to be worried about_.

This pervasive facade he had built around himself was very good at making the choice not to worry. Emotions rolled off it, water cascading off glass. It made for a very easy life, a perfect shelter to let himself work. His genius was best when it was given a nice, easy stage. But this was not a _performance_ , this was _Yuuri_ , and he was not always sure which part of himself to trust when it came to this. _Every_ part of him loved Yuuri, not just the facade he’d built. It was a biblical truth holding him together sometimes; he knew it as certain as skating. This love was different.

He wished things were going to stay as simple as they were in Japan. They weren’t. And neither the facade, nor the scared, too-sharp, too-delicate artist inside of him knew what to do about it. There wasn’t a frame Victor had that could fix this problem.

He didn’t know how to help Yuuri adjust to the media, or to making out. And he didn’t know how to help Yuuri adjust to Russia, or the pervasive cultural shock that was sure to follow. Japan had been a dream to him. It was a very real possibility that Russia would be a nightmare to Yuuri. Most of it was hinged on their relationship and the culture here. It would be rough. Victor expected it. But did Yuuri?

The smiling, unworried Victor didn’t want to think about it much. Worrying did no good, he had better things to do. But the boy with bright eyes that had decided he was going to Japan, _he_ was afraid. Yuuri was being different, Russia felt different. The rink felt different. And today, for eight long hours, this boy had been nothing but frustrated that he could write for _Yuuri’s_ program, but not his own. _That_ boy was terrified that these changes were permanent.

Victor realized he was at the kitchen table now, picking at the food that had long gone cold. He had no recollection of when he’d gotten off the couch, but now he was here. Every tiny movement he made with his body was distant, beyond a brewing maelstrom. He picked up the bowl, placed it in the microwave, shut the door. The process was automatic.

With a clinical clarity, he decided that this wasn’t about Yuuri at all. He began examining facets of himself, methodic, hunting for the source of his odd distress. He was...frustrated. Why?

The microwave beeped at him. He pulled out his bowl, picked up his chopsticks, and began eating at the counter. The apartment was silent around him, open and aching. Makkachin was with Yuuri, and it had been a long time since Victor felt so alone.

He spurred himself into motion, afraid of a _nothingness_ that thick. If Yuuri was going to throw himself into his escape, Victor would follow suit.

The minibar in the corner had been his first big expense, as a gold-winning world champion. It had been the first disposable money he’d ever had. A testament to what he’d achieved. He went to it because it was not a beer kind of night, and there was a bottle of vodka on the bottom shelf. That bottle was whispering his name as sure as any lover.

There was a ritual to this. These nights when he woke up on the tiled floor of his kitchen with a dog and a blanket and an empty glass at 10am and late for everything, including practice. They happened. Victor was very good at ignoring problems, but sometimes they came so close they nipped his heels. He supposed in some way, this was how he casually tripped and fell on his face.

It was only polite to warn his coach that it was _that_ kind of night. And they had a ritual for that, too, because it just wouldn’t be _Vitya_ to come right out and tell Yakov the _whys_ of it. He was too cheerful, too carefree for that. These walls were too high for him to tell his coach that yes, they needed to discuss those _strategies_.

His fingers wrapped around the neck of the vodka, and he picked it up to read the label. He pulled out his phone and took a photo of the brand’s logo, without the name. He texted the photo to Yakov.

A minute passed. Two.

‘ _Yat Vodka. Wheat. It’s a Lux.’_

Victor smiled and checked it against the label. Right again. He put the bottle down, picked up another and sent a photo of its logo.

_‘Dovgan Hlebnaya. Rye.’_

He poured himself some of the Dovgan, and set the bottle back on the shelf. A moment later, his phone vibrated.

_‘Don’t do anything stupid, Vitya.’_

Ah. Well, of course Yakov would _know_.

A swipe of the thumb, up into his text history with his coach revealed dozens and dozens of exchanges like this. Usually in clusters, almost always at odd hours of the night. Victor sipped the glass he’d poured.

Yakov was a vodka hobbyist. He drank it like only a Russian could, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the brands. He liked to quiz Yakov; at some point when he was younger it became a game to find a brand that Yakov _didn’t_ immediately recognize. He sent the logos when he saw them, when the thought about it. Sometimes he sent them when he felt alone.

And Yakov never asked why.

Victor Nikiforov existed in pieces, and these pieces were not allowed to touch.

 _‘Do you remember World in 09?’_ he texted his coach. It was an impulse. His thoughts swirled to a stand-still, delicate.

The response was not immediate, this time. He was into his second glass by the time his phone vibrated again. He did not wonder what he hoped to achieve, because he was not the sort of creature that thought ahead.

_‘That counts as stupid.’_

His vision swam. He blamed the alcohol.

Another text.

_‘You were sloppy at practice. Get some sleep.’_

He put the phone away, because if he kept it out any longer he would say something stupid and he knew better. Even on a third glass of 100 proof vodka, he knew better. He stumbled his way over to the television, found the most abrasively vapid television show he could find, and threw himself into it with a reckless abandon. He laughed, got drunk, and studiously _enjoyed_ it.

The food, at least, was quite good.

 

XxX

 

He took Yakov’s advice, although unwillingly. He didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep until Yuuri’s warm hand woke him.

“Victor.” Yuuri sounded worried. “Are you going to sleep out here?”

A pause.

“Can we talk?”

He opened his eyes. Yuuri was blushing, furiously. Makkachin rubbed his nose along the palm of his hand. All of these things were welcome. He reached up and pulled Yuuri into a hug, still drunk enough to be dumb and happy and willing to ignore problems. More important than any _discussion_ was Yuuri’s lithe frame, the quiet scent of his skin and the thick knit of his sweater.

“You’re back,” he said into Yuuri’s soft hair.

“V-Victor! This isn’t--wait, hang on--”

Interesting. This was serious.

He loosed his hold and let Yuuri right himself. He managed to sit up, but he was groggy and half-drunk, half-hungover. It wasn’t a particularly good place to be, when one’s fiance came back wanting to _talk_. And he wasn’t very good at emotional conversations, even when sober. “What is it?”

“Can we--talk about the news broadcast? Um. Yurio texted me, and he said to ask you about ‘09, because he doesn’t know either and he said they mentioned it on the interview and I know you never talk about it and I know that’s the year you cut your--”

“ _Yuuri_.”

“--hair.”

Anyone else, and it was easy. He would laugh and deliver the same statement he’d given to a thousand other curious fans. _‘I live to surprise people.’_ But this was _Yuuri_ . Those brown eyes were so kind, he was open and honest and terrifying in how he could pull truths from him. It didn’t matter how deep it was or how badly he wanted to guard it, Yuuri just had to _ask_ , and...

“What do you want to know?” he knew he sounded sharp. He hoped Yuuri did not think it was directed at him.

Yuuri flinched. _He did_.

“What’s the connection? Why are people bringing it up? What happened? Why did you cut your hair?” Yuuri stammered, hemorrhaging the questions he must have been sitting on for the months they’d been together. “Why don’t you talk about your past, before you met me? Why don’t you talk about your childhood? Why don’t you-- _why don’t you have silverware from your mom’s?_ ”

He went numb. He wasn’t sure where to start. Yuuri’s face was red, he fell to his knees in front of the couch and took Victor’s hand.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean you have to tell me all that now. I--” his mouth snapped shut. Yuuri moved his thumb over a knuckle with a tenderness only he was capable of. It rocked Victor to his core. He felt horribly malformed, all acute angles and sharp edges when Yuuri touched him with such grace. “Nobody else knows you how I do, because you _show_ me things. But you’re not showing me this.”

Was that what he did? It was news to Victor. What had he shown Yuuri up until now? A little wry, he hoped it wasn’t anything _too_ revealing. “Maybe it’s not anything worth showing,” he answered. His voice was _almost_ the pristine, flawless thing that he wanted it to be, but it wasn’t quite. It was just a little flat, just a little hollow. Yuuri would know.

“It _is_ worth it!” Yuuri said. He just cared _so much_ . It was all over his face. “You don’t _want_ to show me this, and that _scares_ me.”

_You don’t want to show me._

He didn’t want to _touch_ it. If he could show Yuuri without having to think about it, he would. But as it was, there was a very tidy abyss standing between each and every fraction of himself, and these pieces were _not allowed to touch_ . The Victor that lived and breathed in 2009 was not the Victor laying on this couch. Just the phrase _‘09_ hurt on some level he didn’t want to get close to. It had been so long since he even _thought_ about it.

“Ah.” He sat up by increments, sick and dizzy from the impending hangover. Yuuri did not let go of his hand, and he did not stop squeezing Yuuri’s fingers for life support. He pressed his lips against the inside of Yuuri’s wrist, right over his pulse. “ _Zolotse._ _Mon amour._ ”

Yuuri’s brow furrowed. “Victor?”

Honestly, he was as surprised as Yuuri was when the first tear fell. He looked at the tiny drop of water, stared at where it had landed on Yuuri’s wrist and wondered why his vision was so blurry. Was it the alcohol? Uninvited, a sick feeling rose up with it, curtailed with the phantom smell of hibiscus and peat moss, freshly turned earth and ink.

It had been a long, long time since he had allowed himself to remember. Long curls, a smile like honey and tea. A studio that had rotting floors and frozen pipes but a breathtaking view of the sun coming up over Saint Petersburg. A glacial day one September morning when he’d cut the thread for good.

“Victor, you’re crying,” Yuuri said in that confused, worried way he had back in Barcelona. It was becoming familiar. A warm palm cupped his cheek and Victor leaned into it. “We don’t--we don’t have to talk about this now. I--I didn’t mean to make you upset.”

“I’m…” Was he upset? He didn’t know. He didn’t _feel_ upset. He felt numb. But tears kept leaking from his eyes, so maybe he was. “It’s not you.”

“But I pushed.”

He leaned forward and kissed him. He didn’t show his hunger like he had before; it was chaste and tasted like tears but he needed it. And Yuuri gave it to him without question.

“I pushed you, too. Before.” He smiled, haphazard, crooked but honest and intimately close. “I had it coming.”

At the mention of their earlier heated touches, Yuuri’s face went red. He flinched away, but didn’t pull back. “I ran away. I’m sorry.” With a thumb he banished the tear stain from Victor’s cheek and kissed the place it had been. “Let’s go to bed, okay?”

He nodded. Yuuri tugged him to his feet by the wrist then gently led him into the bedroom like a man half-asleep. Nothing but careful movements, Yuuri’s softness wrapped around his ragged edges as easily as the bed shaped to the contours of his back when he laid down. He stripped down to his boxers, let the clothes fall to the floor and stared at the ceiling while Yuuri vanished into the bathroom for his nightly routine.

It was still odd to think that Yuuri was in _his_ bathroom, using _his_ toothpaste. It wasn’t something Victor intended on changing, not for the world. And definitely not for a country that widely believed two men sharing a bed was inherently wrong.

But even if he promised himself that--he’d failed once.

How was he going to keep Yuuri safe?


	4. Messy Ends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning to all: this is a sex chapter. Skip ahead if you want to continue with the story.

“Victor.”

There were only a few ideas he’d had over the course of his twenty four years that ranked  _ worse _ than this one. He  _ knew _ it was stupid and a terrible time and should definitely be something that waited, but if they waited he was going to lose his nerve and overthink the whole ordeal again.

But he had  _ literally _ just made Victor cry. There couldn’t have been a worse time for this.

He rounded the corner back into the bedroom and stopped short. It didn’t matter that he’d been in Victor’s company for months--seeing him nearly-naked was just as poignant an experience now as it was the first time. And it was stunning. It had him hanging in the doorway  _ studying _ this vision instead of approaching the bed they  _ shared _ . And it didn’t matter that Victor wore his ring, he was still perfect and flawless and he belonged in a museum for Greek statues instead of here, with him.

He realized Victor was staring back at him, now, and he choked on himself. “Um--I--I was thinking on my run, and--”

“Yuuri.” He would never get tired of hearing Victor say his name, with his slanted vowels and his clipped consonants. “Come here.”

He crossed the carpet and approached the side of the bed reverently. Victor pulled him the rest of the way, impatient or desperate or both. There was another kiss in the chaos of limbs and adjustments that followed, sending sparks of bright white flying down his spine. He ended up on his back, propped up against the mountain of pillows with Victor’s head on his shoulder. Their legs were entwined and he couldn’t stop thinking about the bare skin of Victor’s thigh, and where that thigh was touching his own through the thin fabric of his linen pjs.

It was hard to convince himself to just sleep, now. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, after hyping himself up over the course of the evening. Victor was a warm weight against his side and he wanted to explore that weight. More than anything.

Victor leaned up and kissed him again. Unprompted, unhesitating, like he  _ knew _ the direction Yuuri’s thoughts had gone and was quietly accepting the proposal. It was chaste until a tongue brushed his bottom lip. Yuuri gasped, and then their tongues were entwining, sudden with a certain magnetism. He could have sworn the room temperature spiked by ten degrees. He felt Victor’s arms snake around his shoulders to anchor him closer. The kiss deepened. Their lips broke apart with an audible wet sucking, and one kiss was followed by another. And another. There seemed to be more to discover about Victor’s mouth with every pass, some new angle to investigate at. He just wanted a little bit more.

And there it was, that creeping need that scared him so fundamentally. That hint of something so much greater that curled around his spine and collected between his legs. He twitched to life, began to grow. The panic set in when he realized that Victor would  _ know,  _ they were so close that he’d be able to feel it. It seemed shameful, to have his arousal discovered. Even though they were laying on a bed, in each other’s arms, Yuuri still had trouble working past it. He was so-- _ dull _ compared to Victor. Why did Victor want  _ him?  _ How could arousal be anything but a criminal thing, when Victor was so  _ very perfect _ , and he was just...Yuuri?

“Are you okay?” Victor asked. The timbre of his voice carried through his chest and into Yuuri’s throat, smooth and musical.  _ I’m not the one that was on the couch crying _ , Yuuri wanted to say. “Do you want to keep going?”

Yuuri nodded. “I want to do this.”

Suddenly, Victor was above him, balanced carefully with his knees on either side of Yuuri’s legs, weight rested on one hand against the mattress. He didn’t know when the move happened, it was so fluid and natural. This was where he belonged, this warm weight resting between Yuuri’s hands. The kisses continued, small heated exchanges of tongue and lip and teeth. Yuuri discovered what biting felt like, and quietly rejoiced when he learned to play with Victor’s bottom lip and elicit a moan out of him.

Maybe he  _ wasn’t _ bad at this. 

He wanted to make Victor breathless, he thought. He wanted to learn all the ways Victor could come undone, and see him in ways no one else had before. He wanted  _ that _ . His body responded to the thought, and the kisses, and he felt the familiar wall of fear rushing up to meet him.

This was new, and new things were scary. But Victor’s fingers moved through his hair in gentle, sensual strokes, and his mouth was very warm, and it was easy to forget that he was supposed to be afraid of anything right then.

Victor’s body shifted into his. There was a friction, a muscled thigh against him, and he gasped and the electric  _ need _ that shot up his spine. A tongue in his mouth, a hand moving down his chest to grip his hip with a sure strength. His toes curled.

That hand moved under the waistband of his pjs. Alien sensations, fingers on the delicate skin just below his navel. Yuuri wrapped both arms around Victor’s shoulders and buried his face in his neck, looking for shelter and his scent. He had no idea what to do with his hands, his own limbs seemed unmanageable. Everything was confusing and exciting and  _ raw _ . He writhed when Victor touched him, unaccustomed to the feeling that shot down his legs.

He’d masturbated many times, of course. Being a teenager, single and confused, had taught him that his own hand was a lot safer than coming out or examining why he’d never thought of Yu-chan as attractive, only cute and endearing. He’d resigned himself to his hand and the ice, skating and collapsing into an exhausted sleep every night had solved loneliness in a way that hadn’t gotten in the way of his skating career. That was the best route, Coach Celestino had told him once. For  _ years _ it had been all he needed or wanted, even through college when most boys his age were well into their forays into dating. He remembered the looks he got in Detroit at the rinks, with so many of the other young prospective skaters there to speculate about him.

He didn’t know why he was thinking about Detroit when Victor’s hand slid into his boxers. It was...weird.

“Are you okay?” Victor asked again, this time into his ear. The breath on his skin made him shudder.

Again, he nodded, but he wasn’t as certain this time. He swallowed. “Yes,” he said aloud. He wasn’t sure if he was convincing himself, or if he was convincing Victor. “I want to do this,” he repeated. It had become a mantra.

His mouth crashing back down, lips and heated exchanges of saliva and teeth. Yuuri arched his back, found that this new angle of his hips gave him a whole new style of friction and went hot and limp. Then he did it again, just a little experimental, looking for that spark. Victor’s long delicate fingers wrapped around his pulsing erection, and he yelped.

He hadn’t expected it to be so  _ intense _ .

They both hesitated. Yuuri waited for the panic, breathed, and when it didn’t come he nodded. Victor’s hand slid down his length, sent a shudder through him. He had no control over it, he immediately began moving against Victor’s hand, thrusting up into the warm pressure of those fingers. He wanted more, more. 

Only in retrospect, did he realize that Victor only had to stroke him a handful of times before it became too overwhelming. He stiffened up, a bright rush pulsed through him and he came, hard and fast. The process felt impossibly long, an  _ ordeal _ , but the reward was enough to make his head, his racing thoughts, all his anxieties simply...short out.

For a long moment, everything was just  _ okay _ .  _ The endorphin rush,  _ his practical mind informed him.  _ They taught this in sex-ed. _

He reached up, feeling stupid and happy. His fingertips trailed down Victor’s cheek. Victor smiled. “Good?”

Yuuri nodded.

“I love you,” he said.

Victor leaned down. They kissed, soft and slow. “And I love you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next update will be up on Saturday!


	5. Dark Tidings

He left the apartment alone the next morning. He jogged to the rink, found the locker that Victor had shown him during his brief orientation two days ago, and stashed away his backpack. Many things were different, but absurdly it was the color of the locker that was making him the most homesick. Back home, the lockers were not painted on the inside, instead left to rust and oxidize over the years. It meant the occasional chip of rust on some of his bags, but the smell was what he remembered. The coppery tang on the back of his tongue when he leaned in to collect his belongings, the way the doors were so old they were hanging at angles; they were all images that had him aching for the Ice Castle.

These lockers were painted and pristine on the inside. It was off-putting. The tiles weren’t aging, the corridors were well-lit and populated. The last time he’d been in a facility that took such good care of its skaters was in Detroit, and that thought alone was enough to make his chest feel tight.  _ Detroit _ . Where he’d tried and failed.

“Hey Piggy. Where’s Victor?”

Yuuri jumped, beamed his head on the top of the locker and yelped. He turned to face the entrance while gingerly rubbing the bump forming on the back of his head. Yuri walked in, backpack slung over one shoulder, hood pulled up over his blond hair. He looked just as pissed off as any teenager should, although mildly amused that Yuuri had managed to hurt himself. Yuuri smiled at the familiar face, and Yuri  _ immediately _ went back to scowling.

“Um--Victor slept in.” He turned and resumed packing his supplies into his locker. He may have over-packed for his first day, but having a few extra towels in his locker had always served him well in the past. “He said he’s going to catch up...he was drinking last night.”

A derisive snort. Yuri approached his locker and threw his backpack in carelessly. Yuuri noted that it was only one row away from his own. He wondered if Victor had anything to do with the placement. “Of course he was. What did he say?”

With his locker squared away, Yuuri took his skates in one hand and moved over to the benches to begin lacing up. Yuri followed suit. “...I haven’t gotten him to say anything yet,” Yuuri admitted. “I asked him about it, but...I don’t know.”  _ Whatever happened, I think it was really bad,  _ was what he wanted to say. But somehow that felt like a betrayal of what Victor had shown him--the very little he’d shown. This was a way that Yuuri knew Victor that no one else could know. He guarded the tears he’d witnessed last night as their little secret, quiet and held close to his heart.

Yuri grunted. “Maybe Mila knows.”

“Maybe,” Yuuri agreed, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know from her. He wanted Victor to tell him. “I don’t know if we-”

Too late. Yuri had marched over to the door and howled out into the lobby,  _ “hey, you old hag!” _

_ Old hag, huh? _ Yuuri hid his smile behind his collar while he finished lacing up his skates. He caught Mila entering the locker room out of the corner of his eye. He’d long suspected that Yuri’s constant sour name-calling and bitterness was a way of showing his affection, but now he was certain of it. He only began name-calling when he became comfortable.

“Aw, you’re inviting me to gossip with your new friend?” Mila asked, wry. She ruffled Yuri’s hair and came right over to where Yuuri was prepping. “Hey, Yuuri. Nice to have you on-board. Don’t let the little kitten here scare you, okay?”

“What did you just call me?! Hey, you old--”

Yuuri smiled at her. “It’s okay. I missed having Yurio around every day. I’m looking forward to being rinkmates with you both.”

Mila grinned. “Yurio, huh? It’s cute, I like it.”

The noise Yuri made was not unlike a cat hissing, which didn’t help his ‘kitten’ persona. “Look, I didn’t call you in here to make  _ friends _ , I wanted to  _ ask _ you something, old hag.”

She set her hands on her hips. “And what’s that?”

“What happened in ‘09?” he asked.

Mila frowned. “You mean what they were talking about during that interview last night?”

Both Yuri and Yuuri nodded.

She made a show of thinking about it. “Didn’t he cut his hair?”

Yuuri perked up. “Yes--it was the year he cut his hair right before Worlds. The only public statements he ever made on it were  _ ‘I live to surprise. _ ’ There wasn’t a single journalist that could get him to expand on the decision, or why he would choose such a drastic style change so abruptly, in the middle of a season like that. He took the silver in the championship, and many people believed it was because of the last-minute change in both style and composition on his free skate. He-”

He realized both Mila and Yuri were staring at him. He swallowed thickly.

“--he changed the music to his free program two weeks before Worlds started, which was both frowned upon and not recommended by his coach,” he finished, somewhat more muted than when he’d begun. “He...never explained that change, either.”

Inwardly, he very much wanted to sink into the floor and leave Russia forever. What did they think of him now? He’d done  _ such a good job _ of hiding his long-standing Victor otaku phase. These two were  _ rinkmates _ with Victor, he wasn’t some god to memorize every tiny fact about, to them. He was just Victor. And--well, he was just Victor to Yuuri, too. But there were many layers to that love, and knowing every facet of Victor’s skating career just so happened to be one of them.

“...I’m gonna go warm up,” he mumbled, mortified. He began shuffling over to the corridor that led to the rink.

“It  _ had _ to have been a boy,” Mila stated, factual.

Yuuri watched in fascination as Mila and Yuri followed him. Did they... _ not _ think he was creepy? They were just going to continue speculating about Victor’s past?

“Victor’s love life hasn’t been very public,” Yuuri agreed. “It could have been.”

“Well, they were talking about the gay thing,” Yuri said. “On the interview. It’d make sense.”

“Yuuri, are you sure they didn’t have any specials about him being in a relationship around that time?” Mila asked. “I’m sure if we googled it we’d be able to find something.”

“Not anything confirmed. There were some rumors going around on some local Russian newspapers, I think, but I can’t read Russian and no translations ever came out,” Yuuri admitted.

“... _ Victor Nikiforov spotted at local park with unidentified man, _ ” Yuri read. He’d already looked it up and was reading it off his phone. “ _ It has been confirmed by eyewitnesses that Victor Nikiforov was on what appeared to be a romantic outing with another man, approximately late twenties. The couple were seen kissing by the ocean front. Thus far, the identity of the other man has not been confirmed, but-” _

“When is the date on that?” Mila asked.

“Is this a  _ gossip circle _ or a  _ skating team?! _ ” Yakov roared. He descended on them still wearing his knee-length trench coat and his modest bowler’s hat. He’d barely even been through the door a minute and he had already started firing warning shots. “Yuri, Mila, out on the ice.  _ Now _ .”

They were already on their way. Yuuri abruptly found himself very alone, and very exposed. Yakov was not the kind of coach he responded well to, especially when he was feeling anxious on a new rink, in a foreign place. But Yakov looked like he had something to say, and Yuuri suspected he never had a chance of escaping this one. 

The silence dragged on between them. What would happen if he bolted? Not that he could run very fast in his skates. He felt like Yakov was sizing him up, or deciding how to best get rid of him.

“Well, you’re here to stay.” Yakov didn’t bother to look happy about it. That was alright. Yuuri appreciated that Yakov was important to Victor, but he didn’t think he would ever be anything more than a polite acquaintance to this man. “For now.”

“I am very thankful to you for allowing Victor and I to skate here.” Yuuri bowed politely. 

“Don’t distract my skaters.” He was gruff, bristly, still frosted from the brisk walk outside. Yuuri nervously met those steely eyes, determined to show Yakov that he  _ wasn’t scared _ . He didn’t think Yakov was buying it. “Don’t distract  _ Victor.” _

At least Yakov handed him the flint he needed to spark the fire. A new sort of courage lifted his chest, ballooning and warm and wonderful. “Victor is here also as my coach.”

Yakov closed the distance between them. “And I’m  _ his _ coach. His  _ career _ is my primary concern. I realize I am the only one here that  _ still thinks about it _ , but Vitya will  _ win _ the next championship, you will  _ not _ get in the way of that.”

“I think that’s Victor’s choice to make.”  _ Am I making him weak? Victor has been acting weird ever since we landed _ .  _ Is he regretting his decision to do both?  _ “Thank you again for your hospitality, Coach Yakov.”

A heavy sigh. For the first time, Yuuri saw how old he was. Yakov looked tired.

“You inspire him.” He said it like it was an apology. There was a very brief softening in the severe line of his brow. Almost like he knew Yuuri  _ had _ to be there, even if he didn’t want it. Like Yuuri was inevitable as the sun setting, and no matter how badly Yakov wanted that sun to stay, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to change it. The analogy wasn’t too far off the mark--Victor  _ was _ a bit like a natural disaster, all the beauty and chaos and brilliance of a storm.

“I guess I do,” Yuuri agreed. “It’s still hard to wrap my mind around.”

Yakov gestured at him to follow, and moved back into the locker room. They’d begun to gather an audience, Yuuri realized with some absent shock. Both Yuri and Mila had decided they wanted to practice with some slow loops on this side of the rink and nowhere else. Yuri was not as subtle as Mila was, and was outright staring at them.

Once they had some privacy amid the lockers, Yakov turned and cut to the chase. “I want you to stop talking to those two about what you heard on television. It’s going to get in your head, and in  _ his _ . He can’t afford another slump, neither can you. And the media attention you two have won’t be as friendly here in Russia as it was internationally.” It was so matter-of-fact that it took a moment for Yuuri to absorb what he said.

“Are you talking about the ‘09 thing?” Yuuri asked, feeling stupid for asking. But  _ if Yakov knew _ , then it definitely had to do with his skating career and Victor  _ wasn’t telling him _ . “Do you know what happened?”

Yakov crossed his thick arms over his chest. “If he hasn’t told you, he doesn’t want you to know. Respect that.” 

A flinch that he couldn’t quite hide. “It was something bad, wasn’t it?” It was bad, it had to do with another relationship that Victor hadn’t told him about and hadn’t allowed to be public like his various flings with women over the years,  _ and _ Yakov was telling him to stay away from it.  _ What had happened? How did he help Victor? _

He still had questions, but their conversation was evidently over. Yakov was walking back through the door toward the rink, content that he had rattled Yuuri enough for his warning to sink in. But Yuuri was not done. He still had questions.  

“Is that why he cut his hair? The bad thing that happened?” Yuuri asked his retreating back.

Yakov froze in the doorway, hung on the edge of one moment and the next. The question had caught him off-guard, or at least Yuuri liked to think that. Maybe if he was as off-guard as Yuuri was, then they could have an honest conversation.

“...He never told me,” Yakov admitted. “But I think so.”

Then he was gone, out by the rink shouting at Yuri to stop arguing with Mila. It felt a bit like Yakov was running away from the question.

Yuuri sighed. He wondered if it was safe to continue the conversation he’d had with Victor last night, and he wondered if Victor was planning on coming into practice today. He was in a strange place with foreign people, and all he really wanted was Victor by his side. These questions had rapidly created a distance between them, whether it was real or just in Yuuri’s head, he had no idea. He didn’t want to push, but whatever had happened was coming up in the news in relation to Yuuri himself and he wanted to know what that meant, especially with the apparent issue that Russia was not going to be as friendly to him as the international audience had been.

He wondered what else Russia could do that was worse than his reception during the Prix series, when he’d been seen as the man that stole Victor away from the ice. He had assumed that was his greatest crime in the eyes of this country, taking their national hero like that.

Self-conscious and still unsure of whether Yakov wanted him on the ice, Yuuri sat on one of the benches and took his cell phone out. He swiped the unlock sequence, moved to his texts and opened up his thread with Victor out of habit. No new messages, of course. There was no way Victor was still asleep, it was nearly noon.

_ ‘Are you coming into practice?’ _ he texted, then thumbed the screen lock and slid the phone back into his pocket. When his phone didn’t vibrate immediately, his worry bloomed.  _ Something is wrong _ .

He waited in the locker room, pretending that he wasn’t counting the seconds that passed with no text back.

“I can tell you.”

Yuuri nearly fell off the bench. He spun, saw Georgi standing in the doorway. Apparently Victor was not the only one that had decided to be late to practice. He had no idea how long Georgi had been there, or what he’d heard of his conversation with Yakov. “E-excuse me?”

“He cut his hair over heartbreak,” Georgi said. He frowned. “Victor won’t see it like that. But I saw it. It was his first love, those are special.”

“Why did they bring it up in the interview, though?” Yuuri asked. He knew Victor had previous relationships, and had never bothered to breach his privacy about them. He’d never needed, nor wanted to. But this seemed to be much more than just water under the bridge, if it was still being brought up in relation to Victor’s life now, years later.

Georgi rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. “Well, other than you, Victor has only dated one other man, and that was in ‘09.” Yuuri didn’t think too hard about the fact that Georgi just  _ knew this _ . He did seem to have an odd fascination with love, and he  _ was _ nearly the same age as Victor. Maybe it was normal to just remember these things about your rink mates in Russia. Or if your name was Georgi. “So if I were to guess, it probably has to do with the...you know.”

He frowned. “The what?”

“The, uh…” Georgi cleared his throat. “The  _ gay  _ thing. It’s not as  _ okay  _ here, as it is in some other places.”

_ Mila was right _ , he thought. “Thank you, Georgi.”  _ One other man, who is gone now. Whoever he was. _

The brief look of surprise that crossed Georgi’s face made Yuuri think that he wasn’t thanked very often. He mumbled something that resembled ‘ _ not a problem _ ,’ in his stilted English, then moved through the locker room to the rink. Yuuri watched him go, contemplating his next move.

He was glad that the skaters here were all so welcoming. He hadn’t expected to be hip-deep in rumors and speculation his first day, but oddly their willingness to share made him feel more at home. It was almost like being back in Hasetsu, in some strange way. And being able to talk to his rinkmates like this gave Yuuri a vision of Victor that he hadn’t known before. He appreciated it.

It was time to discuss the situation with Victor. He had an idea of what was going on now, he thought, and Victor thought he was protecting him. But if they kept dancing around the issue, how were they going to continue on equal footing?

_ ‘I’m coming back to the apartment,’ _ he texted. He unlaced his skates, packed away his supplies, and slipped out the front before anyone could notice him leaving. He was losing a valuable afternoon of practice, but it was a price he was willing to pay in order to chase the sadness he’d seen in Victor last night.

 

xx

 

The apartment was empty.

Yuuri stared at the lounge, the dishes, the bed left with both blankets and pillows in disarray. Makkachin whined at him hopefully the second he stepped inside, looking for a walk. He gave the dog a few pats on the head while he wandered around in stunned bafflement. Where had Victor gone?

Maybe he’d just gone out to the store. That seemed reasonable. But it was unlike Victor to leave such a mess behind. It was also unlike him to leave Makkachin behind, if he was just going up the street.

And he still hadn’t received a text.

Worry started to creep up in his gut, sliding into his lungs, sitting like a rock on his chest. He called Victor’s cell, held the phone to his ear and listened to the ringing on the other end. Eventually it clicked over to voicemail, and Victor’s warmly polite message began playing, recorded and stale.

The worry grew until it had teeth. Why would Victor leave the apartment a mess, why wouldn’t he leave a note, why wasn’t he answering his texts? Why would he leave Makkachin here? He hadn’t gone to the rink, he would have run into Victor on the walk back. And Victor would have sent him a text if he was coming in. He had his phone; Yuuri combed the floor and the bed and the couch for a cell phone thinking that perhaps Victor had forgotten it, but no such luck. Wherever he was, he knew Yuuri was texting him.

For the first time since the plane had touched down in Saint Petersburg, Yuuri felt the isolating weight of being in a strange land. He didn’t know the area well enough to go check Victor’s favorite spots, he didn’t even know them all yet. He’d known where to find Victor back in Hasetsu, but this city was different. It was cold, and foreign, and had a problem with  _ the gay thing _ , as Georgi had so eloquently put it.

Without knowing what else to do, he opened up Yuri’s contact and pressed dial. The phone rang a few times, then clicked. He heard muffled cursing and Yakov’s voice hollering that social calls could wait, somewhere in the background.

“Piggy?” Yuri grunted. “What--weren’t you just here? Where did you go?”

“I went to get Victor up, because he wasn’t answering my texts, but I just got back to the apartment and he isn’t here. But it’s a mess and Makkachin is still here and he isn’t picking up his phone and there’s no note.” He had meant to make it sound casual, a question of  _ ‘hey, where does Victor go if he has to think,’ _ but the problem spilled out in a torrent before he could stop it. “I’m...worried,” he finished lamely.

“Huh. Weird.” Yuri sounded about as empathetic as a fifteen year old boy-genius could be. “What do you want me to do about it?” His voice was flat, he was bored, but he hadn’t hung up the phone and that was the part that mattered.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t…”  _ I didn’t think this through _ . “Does Yakov have any ideas? Is there anywhere Victor goes to think, maybe?”

“Yeah, hang on let me ask.” The phone went quiet. He heard muffled voices shouting at each other through Yuri’s hand on the receiver, but he couldn’t make out any words. He busied himself with giving Makkachin scritches, because he desperately did not want to think. He was terrified of what was behind the gauze of shock insulating him.

More rustling. It wasn’t Yuri on the line anymore. “Yuuri?” Yakov’s voice. 

Yuuri desperately muffled his yelp. “C-coach Yakov--I don’t mean to cause any trouble--” Yuuri didn’t know why he was so worried that Yakov would be angry. It was instinctual, gut-level and terrifying.

“Get a coat, I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The line went dead. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cliffhanger! Whoops. ;3c Just an update for the story as a whole: you'll all be glad to hear that I am mostly done with the FINAL CHAPTER. Meaning that there will be NO delays with updates, because the whole fic is finished. Yay! We're going to be clocking in at 9 or 10 chapters, depending on if I split the monster second-to-last chapter into 2 chunks. The next update will be on Saturday.


	6. On a Frozen Lake

“I told him not to do anything stupid last night,” Yakov grumbled. Yuuri wasn’t sure if it was actually a conversation, or if Yakov was simply muttering angrily to himself. “This counts as stupid, Vitya.”

“Um.” He stared at his hands, and wondered why his knuckles looked so white. He tried to grip his knees with less force, but his fingers didn’t seem to want to cooperate. The car shuddered around them as they went over another pothole. “Where are we going?”

Yakov sighed. He didn’t look away from the road, didn’t take his hands off the steering wheel. “It’s just a hunch. But I think I know where he went.”

Yakov’s car was an old beat-up sedan, with rust creeping under the chassis and a passenger side door that required a bit of love before the lock would give and the door would open. The whole car rattled when he pushed the speed over 60mph, and Yuuri was occasionally terrified that it would just begin rattling off pieces around them. The only new part of the car was the camera installed on the dash, something that Yakov referred to as ‘idiot insurance’ when Yuuri asked about it.

He’d only been in Saint Petersburg a few days, and before thirty minutes ago, he’d had no idea Victor even owned a car. It made sense; Russia was not like Japan. Things were much farther apart out here, and bikes stopped being feasible in such cold weather. It was more of an expectation to own a vehicle. Of  _ course  _ Victor had a car. But he never checked to see if it was in the lot, it was Yakov that checked when he arrived at the flat a bare five minutes after they spoke on the phone.

It was very hard to feel like he knew Victor in ways no one else did, when he didn’t even know what his car looked like.

He focused on his breathing.

_ Is it me?  _ The tiny voice at the back of his skull had claws that dug deep.  _ Was it last night? Did I do something wrong? _

“Does he do this a lot?” Yuuri asked. His voice was very tiny, and very thin.

Yakov grunted. For a long moment, Yuuri didn’t think he was going to say anything at all. Then--

“Before he met you, yes. He had moods,” he said. The words were infuriatingly enigmatic. “He’s been different since he met you. Happier. I didn’t think he’d be pulling these stunts again.”

_ Stunts _ . Yakov made it sound like a tantrum, like something that Yurio would do for attention. Vanishing without a note was far scarier. “He never did this back home,” he mumbled.

A long pause. Yuuri desperately wished they were still back home, and hated himself for wishing that. Coming to Saint Petersburg had been the best choice for both their careers, and he knew it. The Ice Castle was not an ideal training facility, Victor’s coach was here. He needed to be  _ happy _ here. But he couldn’t stop feeling that Victor had changed once they landed, and he didn’t know how to reach him again.

“...Yes, I imagine he wouldn’t,” Yakov agreed, at length. 

They sat in silence. The car hummed, the radio droned in a low whisper. Yuuri watched the buildings of Saint Petersburg shrink away, overtaken by the sprawling countryside. The forests were thick around the bay, and as they followed the road north Yuuri watched the ocean view slowly be swallowed by foliage. Yakov hadn’t said where they were going, just that it would be a bit of a drive and he should strap in and wait. The longer Yuuri waited, the harder it became to keep his mouth shut about it. But Yakov was being so kind in driving him out to wherever Victor went; he didn’t want to aggravate. That seemed rude.

He fidgeted.

“Here it is.”

He jumped and looked around. They were pulling around one last bend on a road that had stopped being paved a while back, and was mostly just gravel laid out in the imaginative shape of a road. There was a rough gravel circle that acted as a glorified parking lot, and was deserted except for one other vehicle. It was sporty, a nice two-seater CRX style with at least a dozen poodle-themed bumper stickers.

He knew who owned that car, of course.

Beyond the parking lot was a steep incline, some bushes, and a lake. It was still frozen this time of year, and there was a figure out on the ice.

“Is he...skating?” Yuuri asked. As soon as Yakov put the car in park, he nearly launched himself out the passenger’s side door. 

“Yuuri!” Yakov hollered at him. Yuuri stopped to look at him. “I’ve got training to do with the team. He’s your problem now, got it?”

_ He’s your problem now _ .

He didn’t know why that sentence made him feel ten times bigger, or why it warmed him from the core the way the ring warmed his finger. Yuuri was beginning to suspect that he would never meet Victor’s parents, he was beginning to realize that Yakov was the closest thing to a father that Victor had. And that father had just welcomed him, on some level.

The smile he gave Yakov was stupid and huge, and he knew Yakov didn’t understand why but didn’t care. “ _ Spasibo _ , Coach Yakov. We’ll see you back at the rink!”

 

xx

 

Victor wasn’t skating a program Yuuri had seen yet, and that took front seat to any kind of discussion they could be having. He found a spot near the shore that had a flat rock that could serve as a seat, brushed off the snow, and sat down to watch. He didn’t dare interrupt something as uniquely brilliant as Victor designing a program. Even if they were out in the middle of nowhere on a frozen lake, even if Victor’s coach had to track him down after he left without word or note, Yuuri wanted to see this happen before he interrupted.

He knew Victor had heard him tumble down the hill. He hadn’t been quiet about it, the ice had been hidden and he was lucky that he hadn’t broken his glasses. But Victor hadn’t stopped skating, so he clearly wanted Yuuri to see this. All the more reason to wait until Victor was done before asking him why he’d run off like this.

There was no music playing, of course. But Victor did not need music to tell a story.

A triple salchow on the other side of the lake. Yuuri was not used to seeing jumps made on natural ice like this. Back home they had the ocean and the mountain hot springs, and Hasetsu didn’t stay cold enough for ice thick enough for real figure skating. It was odd to see something like this done outside, but on Victor it was simply beautiful. He looked so much freer out here.

His eyes tracked Victor back across the lake, studied the way he turned and reached out for something that wasn’t there. It was very lonely, he decided. There was regret somewhere in the way he held himself, a mournful tilt of his chin and weight in his hands. He wondered where this program had come from, and he wanted to desperately go out there and show Victor that he wasn’t alone.

He hadn’t brought skates, of course. It was a stupid, fanciful urge anyway.

Victor slowed and neared the shore where he sat. “Yuuri!” He sounded just like Victor,  _ his _ Victor, cheerful and blissfully unaware that they were standing in the middle of nowhere in the Russian wilderness. “You came!”

“Only because Yakov knew where to find you!” Yuuri shouted back. “You didn’t leave me a note or  _ anything!” _

Shock in Victor’s eyes. He was genuinely surprised. “I didn’t? Ah. Silly me.” He laughed, and rubbed the back of his head. “Oh well. Yakov always knows how to find me. No harm done, right?”

Yuuri frowned. He wasn’t happy that Victor was doing this after the night they’d had, but he was glad that Victor was smiling again. Even if his skating seemed sad, even if there were shadows in those blue eyes. At least he was sounding like himself.

“I would have brought my skates if you’d warned me,” Yuuri pointed out.

Victor waved the comment away. “I brought an extra pair. Check my bag!”

They would be too big for him, so performing any high-difficulty jumps were out of the question, but it was a warming to know that even if he’d forgotten the note, Victor had thought about him when he left for this place. Yuuri moved over to the bag sitting on the snow-covered grass and opened it up. Sure enough, there was an extra set of skates inside.

“What were you working on?” Yuuri asked, as he laced them up. They were older skates, scuffed up and well-used, and also a size smaller than what he expected. Were they Victor’s old skates, from his youth? They fit much better than Yuuri was expecting.

“I’m not sure yet.” Victor moved in a lazy loop while he waited, skating backwards for some of it.

This season was going to be different. Victor had his own programs to choreograph, and he also had Yuuri’s to work on. At one point last year, Yuuri could ask Victor about anything he was skating and know that it had to do with his program. But now, he didn’t know if that was overstepping some unspoken rule between competitors.  _ Was that your free skate? _ Did that question constitute cheating?

“Victor?” He clunked and thumped his way to the ice’s edge with the guards on. “How do we do this?”

Victor shot him a bemused, befuddled look. He held offered a hand to help Yuuri balance while he removed the guards. “Skate on a lake?”

He shook his head. “No, be competitors  _ and _ student and coach. Should I not ask about your program? I don’t want people to think…”

The moment he stepped onto the ice, Victor was at his side. Strong hands on his shoulders, then down to his hips. They embraced, and Yuuri didn’t realize how much he needed the contact until he could feel Victor’s heart against his own. The needling conversations he’d heard that day, the events of the night before; he didn’t realize how much weight he’d carried with him until he felt it lift with Victor’s love.

“Nevermind them,” Victor said into his ear, voice a low rumble. “You can know whatever you want to know.”

“Then why are we out here? What were you working on?” A pause. “And…”

Victor sighed. He kissed Yuuri’s cheek, then slid back and away from him. He took Yuuri’s hand and led him out toward the middle of the lake. “You want to know what happened in ‘09, and why everyone at the rink is talking about it.”

The way Victor said it was so worn. Yuuri felt like he’d been caught wondering something dirty. How did Victor know they were talking about it at the rink? “Y-yeah…”

Out on the ice, there was less distance between them. Yuuri never felt like Victor was distant, of course; even off the ice he was close and open and honest. But on the ice,  _ he _ felt closer to Victor. There was less to manage out here, less stress to handle and less worrying about whether he was staring too long, fidgeting too much. Movement was natural, graceful. This was the art they shared, a thread that was warm and pulsing with just as much meaningful weight as the ring around his finger.

Victor let go of his hand and spun around him. Yuuri followed, and they began a lap around the lake. “When I was young-- _ very _ young, mind you--I used to skate on the lake near my hometown,” Victor began. “There weren’t any rinks, it was just a cluster of the local children playing out on the lake during the winter. One time there was a crack in the ice, and one of my neighbours fell in. They posted signs after that, ‘no skating.’ I was never very good at listening to directions, of course. I kept going out to the lake, but I was the only one.”

“Didn’t your parents get worried?” Yuuri asked.

A pause that lasted just a little too long.  _ Why don’t you have silverware from your mom? _ The question echoed from the night before, wrapped its tendrils around his guts and made him curse his own mouth. Why did he bring that up now? Was he trying to make this harder for Victor, by aiming for every possible tough topic?

Victor laughed, light and airy. Yuuri didn’t know what to make of it. It sounded casual, relaxed, and wildly inappropriate for a question like that. “No,” Victor chirped. “I was good, I began drawing a crowd of other local children. They wanted to see me fall in, I’m sure, but I didn’t see it that way at the time. They were my audience, and I wanted to tell them a story.”

A smile, and Victor twirled away. They danced, wove and parted, but they could never stay apart too long. Each time Yuuri found himself skating away from Victor, he turned right around only to find that Victor had done the same. Their dance continued in no set pattern, with moves that were pieced together from many other programs. Yuuri was so familiar with the way that Victor moved, that it was like second nature to match him on the ice.

He mulled over what the story meant. Victor had a habit of telling metaphors, Yuuri had caught onto that during their first summer together. He knew that coming out to this lake had been no coincidence. Nothing was unrelated. Victor was showing him something, as they skated around each other. He was sending the message up like smoke signals for Yuuri to catch and puzzle over.

“Is...that why we’re out here?” Yuuri asked, tentatively, when next they were beside each other. He wasn’t sure he understood all of it, but he sensed that it was very huge and very messy, this tangled thing that Victor was piecing together for him. He wanted to understand, he wanted to  _ help _ more than anything. The need to help beat as strong as his own heart in his chest.

The question earned him a half-shrug. This was a rare site, this Victor bereft of his usual self confidence. Yuuri was sure it was a sight only for him; this angled, beautiful creature was not photogenic nor an easy simple-to-understand charmer. Victor simplified himself for his audience, and that was part of why he was such a skilled storyteller with his performances. He was able to become a single emotion, to lock the rest of himself up and display only the piece that was needed for the story. 

The Victor that was skating with him now was not simplifying anything.

Yuuri spun gracefully, placed himself directly in Victor’s path, skating backwards. Victor slowed down, they were skating nearly chest-to-chest. He didn’t let Victor look away, locked gazes and held it. He’d seen Victor wounded before; the hotel room in Barcelona came to mind, the memory immediate and vicious. But he’d never seen Victor look so raw. He wanted to reach out and touch him--

He realized he  _ could _ , they were  _ together _ now and all those quiet urges he’d ignored over the months came crashing up beneath him. He reached out, hands shaking, took Victor’s face between his palms and kissed him. The air was cold, but the place their lips met was warm and tasted like home.

They stood there long after the kiss ended, safe and comfortable in each other’s arms. Two figures on the ice, sky gone gold and the woods beginning to brood a pregnant darkness around them.

“I asked you to show me and you did,” Yuuri said into the side of Victor’s jaw, first to break the long silence. “Thank you.”

“I can tell you about ‘09,” Victor admitted. His voice was so quiet that the wind nearly took it. “Tonight.” 

There were still questions, of course. But this felt far more important, standing on a frozen lake that reminded Victor of where he learned to skate, learning even the smallest unrelated story about his childhood. It wasn’t the heart of any of the problems that they were faced with, but it was  _ so important _ . 

Yuuri did not expect it to be an easy night, but it was a night that had to happen and he was willing to weather it through at Victor’s side. He smiled and nodded. “Tonight, then.”

The relief in Victor was palpable. Yuuri hadn’t realized he was so strung out until he saw that tension drain out of him; his shoulders loosened and he smiled and delight danced in his blue eyes.

“Okay. But right now, I have an idea for your short program for Nationals,” he burst. Yuuri understood where all this excitement was coming from. “Want to see?”

Yuuri lit up. Some weight had lifted, cast off in their wake. He hugged Victor tighter, and nodded. “I do.”

  
  



	7. In the backseat

They skated long after the sun went down, mostly by moonlight. The air grew unbearably cold, but the back of Victor’s car was warm and so was his mouth. It started just as a way to warm up, because neither of them had dressed well enough to be skating past sundown in Russia. Fingers had gone numb, Victor was absolutely frigid to the touch. But together, skin-to-skin, the world was warm and gauzy. 

Kissing was becoming a very fun past time. It was big and scary at first, but now that he’d fit in so much practice over the past few days, Yuuri fancied that he was getting quite skilled, for a beginner. Victor had an unfair advantage of course, with his years of experience, but Yuuri thought he was closing the gap between them. He could get Victor all pliant and moany, which he’d decided was his overall goal. He wasn’t sure he liked the climax last time as much as he liked hearing all the different noises Victor could make, and somehow that decision made him braver. This wasn’t about  _ seeking _ pleasure, it was about  _ causing _ it. He wanted to explore Victor’s body like he would a new program, figure out all the neat little tricks he could do with what he was given. All the twists and turns he could master, how he could make music.

It was a game changer. Like the moment in China when he’d finally found what Eros meant, he felt like finally this whole making out thing had clicked. He could learn these tiny things, like biting an ear or sliding his hands down a muscular back that would make Victor shudder and squirm beneath him. And they worked every time, they worked differently in different orders. Sometimes feather-light touches down his neck had the best reaction, sometimes biting a shoulder or lip worked best.

Yuuri sat back. They were crammed in the back seat of Victor’s tiny two-door car and there wasn’t much room to maneuver, but he had to stretch his back before going in for round two. Victor pulled his shirt up over his head once he was afforded the break, and Yuuri’s thoughts were promptly derailed.

It was hard to believe he was allowed to do this. And it wasn’t just because of all the fantasies when he was younger. Being with another person seemed surreal, and that it was  _ Victor _ just complicated it. His skin was flawless, and even though he’d seen Victor naked on  _ many _ occasions, somehow knowing that this time was  _ just for him _ made the sight more intense. His mouth dried out, his fingers trembled. His face felt hot. He laid both hands palm-down against Victor’s chest and leaned back down into him, the shirt thrown to the passenger’s seat and forgotten.

“Oh,  _ Yuuri… _ ” Victor trailed off into soft Russian that Yuuri didn’t quite catch, but the words didn’t matter. He still had that same warm tone of voice, that same thick honey that dripped down his spine and made him shiver. Yuuri discovered what he could do with his lips on a naked, perked nipple and had Victor saying a  _ lot _ more in Russian that he  _ still  _ didn’t catch.

He leaned back up to kiss him, to steal those words right from between his lips. It made him brave. He positioned a knee  _ just right _ , and leaned on a little bit of friction against the growing hardness pressing against Victor’s slacks. It was his first deliberate contact, and he was high on it. Victor groaned low in his throat and begged for more.

Then Victor’s pants had come unbuttoned, his belt unhitched. He didn’t know how it happened, but the cloth barriers between them were evaporating like morning mist. Victor slid out of his pants with more speed than Yuuri thought was possible in the back seat of a cramped car, and it was scary but only for a second. It was scary when Yuuri tried to think about what he was doing, but if he just focused on all of this new territory to explore, all this new skin that had been so kindly exposed--it didn’t seem quite as daunting, then. He could do this inch-by-inch, instead of it being one huge thing that he had to be good at. 

He learned that there was a spot just below Victor’s naval, slightly to the left, that was  _ extra _ ticklish, and when he placed his lips there, Victor pleaded and begged. And he learned that if he hooked his arms beneath Victor’s legs that he could control which way Victor’s hips were facing, and that seemed like a very strategic trick to know. He learned how the closer he got to that spot between Victor’s legs, the more desperate he sounded.

The bikini-style underwear had seemed risque and foreign the first time he’d seen Victor strip. Now, he was realizing the advantages. The material was part spandex, stretchy and pliant and easy to manipulate. He was afraid of breaching the last barrier, afraid of touching something new and dangerous, but fingering him through the very thin, very flexible fabric of his underwear was  _ very  _ doable. And with that, those silly little slips Victor called underwear made a  _ lot _ of sense.

His thumb trailed down the side of Victor’s swelling erection. There was this choked grunt that made Yuuri’s throat dry, and his pants feel tight. And he wanted to get another one out of Victor, he wanted a  _ lot _ of them. He grew braver, gripped Victor in his palm with a nervous energy. Maybe it was a little rougher than he intended, but Victor only responded with  _ more _ enthusiasm. Like he wanted it  _ rough _ ...whatever that meant.

In some way, he felt like he was breaching new territory, rewriting the rules he thought he’d known. And he was loving it.

Fingers wove through his hair, fingernails grazed his scalp and made him shudder. They urged him down, down. All at once he understood, but it was big and imposing and just how was he supposed to do  _ that? _

Thankfully his hands seemed to have a better idea of what was happening than he did. Somehow, they knew what to do even when he was balking at it, and he nuzzled the warm shaft he found. Motions too fast for thoughts, now; instinct guided him, desire gave him a courage he wouldn’t have otherwise held. The scent was musky, deep, but distinctly Victor’s. He kissed a trembling vein, and Victor moaned.

Okay, kisses worked. He could do kisses.

Victor said something in Russian. Yuuri had no idea what it was, didn’t recognize a single word, but the  _ way _ Victor said it. It sent a heat right through his gut, a flash-fire that settled between his legs and spoke to him on some level his body understood much better than his ears did. It was that surge of  _ something _ that convinced him that maybe he should try more than just kissing.

A tentative tongue-swipe. Victor’s moan was so encouraging that he had to try it again...and once more, just for good luck. The taste was...odd, at first. But he began to enjoy it the more he acclimated, which meant that he slid just a few more caresses with his tongue. One thing led to another, he knew how this was done in theory. Soon he was wrapping his lips clumsily around the swollen head of Victor’s erection just to see what would happen.

He was not disappointed.

He played a game with himself after that; how deep could he take Victor’s cock? ‘Deepthroating’ was a term he’d learned in Detroit and the idea had fascinated him since. It was difficult, and it would take  _ much _ more practice before he could do it well, he decided. He could go to the back of his throat, but any further and his stomach churned and he didn’t want to leave a mess in the back of Victor’s car.

It was a good thing he would have plenty of chances to fit in that practice. They  _ lived _ together, now.

Victor was not shy about being loud, either, and it  _ helped _ . He wondered more than once if Victor knew it helped to hear the reactions, or if he was just naturally that loud in bed, but he  _ threw _ himself into his pleasure. Anything that felt good was  _ amazing _ , elicited a slurred statement in Russian or a half-breathy  _ ‘you’re beautiful, _ ’ or any series of sweet nothings in that strong accent of his. It did a number on Yuuri’s heart, and was also causing a growing distraction in his own pants. He wasn’t sure what to do about that one, when he was so invested in discovering what new things he could do with what was right in front of him.

Maybe he got a little distracted, a little carried away with exploring what noises Victor would make. A clipped word in Russian that Yuuri didn’t catch, but in retrospect was probably his warning. Victor came as Yuuri ran his tongue up the firm underside of that pulsing shaft, mostly curious to see if it tasted different. He came to a momentary standstill when thick white globs landed on his cheek and glasses, confused. A solid thirty second realization hit him in the back of the head, then, and he backed up. Victor had climaxed. Had  _ he _ made that happen?

He had cum all over his glasses.

They looked at each other and burst out laughing in unison. Victor pulled him down so they were chest-to-chest, pulled his glasses off and wiped off a smudge of pearly white from his cheek with a thumb. They kissed long and deep, and broke only for a smile and the occasional quiet chuckle.

“Warn me in English next time?” he asked with his mouth pressed to Victor’s jawline.

“Mmm...maybe. Your face was priceless though.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up guys!! Next chapter will go up on Friday due to my schedule. c: See you then!


	8. Old Demons

They hit the road some time after midnight. Driving was quiet, peaceful, and the car was so small it was intimate. The space between them was just for them, no one else. Yuuri felt more comfortable than he had since leaving Hasetsu, and he was beginning to think that maybe he  _ would _ get used to this whole Russia thing after all.

He  watched the murky shadows of the forest crawl by out the window. Nothing looked real, he was partially convinced he was living in some drawn-out fantasy. Thoughts wandered, comfortably cradled in the sleepy shadows outside of their tiny sanctuary. 

“Most of the speculation was right,” Victor said after exactly fifteen minutes of nothing but silence and the car engine. Their arms touched when Victor kicked the car into the fifth gear. “I cut my hair because of a breakup. But not in the  _ way  _ they would say it. They wanted to think I went and got my heart broken. I was young, it was only natural. A recent Olympic gold medalist too put together for my age. They wanted to see me make a mistake.” The way Victor spoke of his younger self was so matter-of-fact. Perfect, but so what? Yuuri wondered at the layers in that attitude, all the knots and the bundled problems that he’d never bothered to fix growing up. He wondered if Victor had really ever grown up at all, or if he’d just built himself into this adult that the cameras wanted him to be.

He remembered the magazine articles, the before-and-after pictures about the sudden haircut. The lineup of women the periodicals had at the time, debating which one of those pretty faces were the ones to shatter Victor Nikiforov’s heart. He suddenly felt dirty for purchasing magazines like that out of his desire to know more about Victor. Had he been one of thousands just fanning the flame?

“So then what happened?” he asked at length, when he realized Victor wasn’t going to continue of his own volition.

A painfully casual, painfully measured half-shrug. Victor did not take his eyes off the road. “I broke a man, and he’s gone now. There isn’t much else to tell.”

The radio burbled quietly, a late-night radio announcer droning on in Russian about the weather.  Yuuri swallowed. “...oh.”

_ I broke a man _ , Victor said it like he meant to scare Yuuri. It was cold, and it was ruthless, and his voice was rough in a way that Yuuri had not heard before. But it didn’t scare him. Not in the way Victor wanted, he thought. He ached, though. He hurt because something had hurt Victor  _ terribly _ , something barbed and nasty had laid these scars long before Yuuri had ever looked on them.

He wanted to help. More than anything, he wanted to ease the scars and let them start to fade. It had been under a decade and Victor still held himself like it was a fresh wound, wet and bleeding. It was time to move on. He was no guru of emotional situations, but he wanted Victor to be able to tell him stories about being at the Olympics, and he wanted Victor to be able to  _ smile  _ while he did it, and ‘09 was stopping that from happening.

He took too long to work through the best strategies of tackling the situation; Victor beat him to the punch.

“The team will tell you I’m heartless, if you ask them.” Just pouring salt on the wound, voice flat and distant. It reminded Yuuri of the look he sometimes caught on Victor’s face when he didn’t think anyone else was watching. “They like you, they will worry about you. Because I have a history.”

His eyes dropped down to his lap. Somewhere safe to stare while he mentally worked through the hurdles Victor was throwing at him. “Why did you do it?”

A bitter sigh, frustration that was directed mostly inward. “I’d best just tell you the whole thing,  _ zolotse _ .”

_ Progress _ . Yuuri tried not to shout for the stars. “Well...I’m listening, if you’d like to.”

Another brief silence settled around them, thick and suffocating. Victor’s jaw worked, muscles bunching as he grit his teeth, eyes hyperfocused on the road ahead of them. Yuuri had never cut so close to the bone with Victor’s past; over a year together and it had only ever come up a handful of times, and every time Victor dodged out of the subject Yuuri had let him. He had no place prying, or so he’d thought. But this was going to be a problem, if it got in the way of their relationship. It was time to put it on the table, to get this necessary evil out of the way.

“...After Yakov found me and brought me to St Petersburg, I lived alone,” Victor started. His eyes never strayed from the road ahead of them. He recounted the tale like it was the last thing he wanted to be talking about--it probably was. But here he was, talking about it. For Yuuri. For  _ them _ . “The apartment was in Yakov’s name, because I was fourteen. I skated, and I did everything I could to prove that Yakov’s investment wasn’t in vain. I didn’t get out much, so my only friend was one that I’d made back home, who followed me to the city for the conservatory.”

“He wanted to be a composer?” Memories pricked at him. Victor’s gold-winning performance at the olympics, and all his free skates around the time were composed by the same man. What was his name? Something Sokolov, something very Russian. Was it the same man? 

Victor nodded. “He lived with me for a while, because he was just as poor and I had the room. Yakov supported it because it meant that my apartment was marginally cleaner…” A faint smile at the memory. It faded as quick as it came. “In ‘05 he graduated, and it got...intense. I commissioned him for some pieces to skate to, won the ‘06 Olympics and the GP championships with them, fell a little in love in the process. I was his muse, and I liked the attention.”

He could see it. Young Victor, fresh and reaching greater heights with every performance. An olympic champion by 17, brilliant and a god on the ice. This childhood friend that had been quietly supporting him for years, finally able to construct something that Victor could  _ use _ . The pride, the amazement watching what Victor could do with just simple music; Yuuri could imagine it because he’d been fantasizing about that sort of thing long before he’d ever met Victor face-to-face. He understood this old love of Victor’s more than he should, given they’d never met.

“What happened to him?” Yuuri asked.

“We were found out by the reporters, because I’d just won and they were obsessed with me. I had a flock of photographers following me everywhere I went for a little while.” 

He thought about the article that Yuri had found that morning, after a quick search on Russian news channels. “I thought that story never made it big? I never saw any publications of it outside of Russia.”

Another half-shrug, carefully measured and carefully paced. “Yakov paid them off to keep it quiet, and it stayed mostly local. There weren’t any laws against it at the time, but it wasn’t good publicity for the new rising star. Anyway, I was relatively safe because the people loved me.”

_ There weren’t any laws at the time _ . Yuuri had heard about there being laws against homosexuals, but he knew only by hearsay. Was their lifestyle really against the law, here? Suddenly, with that fact brought up so brutally, Yuuri was beginning to realize the source of Victor’s worries. This wasn’t something to be taken lightly in Russia. This wasn’t about what happened in ‘09. This was learning from the past, and being better prepared for  _ this _ relationship, lest they go down a similar route. Yuuri didn’t think there was any danger of it, but old scars like this took time to heal. Russia had hurt him once, Victor was wary of it now.

Victor continued, although his voice trembled just a little.  “Dima wasn’t as safe. He was trying to find a job for a recent conservatory graduate, but now he had this black stain on his name. The man who slept with a Russian hero, perverted him, stories like that. He had to go back to our home town, hoped his family would take him in. I...ended it with him, because I thought it would help his reputation. I just thought it would help, I didn’t…” His voice cracked, his mouth snapped shut. Victor Nikiforov was not accustomed to his composure slipping.

“Oh,” Yuuri mouthed.

“Yeah.”

Another silence passed between them. Yuuri watched the struggle play across Victor’s face out of the corner of his eye, and did his best to be discreet about it. “It didn’t help, did it?” he asked eventually, testing the waters.

Victor’s pronounced adam’s apple bobbed once. He held himself in sharp angles. “No.”

The boy he’d been at nineteen had been perfect, silver hair and bright blue eyes and a flawless smile. He was sure Yakov hadn’t allowed anything less than that, and Victor was even harsher on himself than his coach. But he’d been  _ nineteen _ , and kids make stupid decisions under pressure. Yuuri understood  _ why _ this was weighing on him, but didn’t understand why he still carried it with him like this, after all these years. Didn’t he know how stupid nineteen year olds were? Brash and full of life and not a lot of critical thinking. 

The car engine revved. Were they going a little fast? The road was straight and there was no one else besides them for miles, but they were going a little fast even for that. Yuuri kept a careful eye on the speedometer. “So...Dima.” He forged ahead. “That’s Dimitri Sokolov, composer of the music for your programs from your senior debut to ‘09, when the arrangement mysteriously ended with no public statements explaining why. This is what happened? The news story broke, and you ended the partnership?” 

Victor nodded mutely.

He wondered, just for a moment, what it must have been like for Dmitri. To have all of Victor’s attention, to have that creative brilliance revolving around him like a sun, then to turn and find it gone. He immediately stopped trying to think about it. Victor had been young. That Victor was not  _ his _ Victor. “He is a brilliant composer,” he said aloud.

Another nod. He saw Victor’s clench and clench again, working to form some silent syllable that never made it to his lips. 

It came to a head, then. Yuuri could understand, the outline of this mess that happened in ‘09. He could imagine Victor, young and brash and stupid, seeing these scandalous news stories and panicking. Never thinking his love could cause something so tragic, so terrible, to another human being. Running, because he was a child never allowed to grow up in a normal environment. Skating could not teach you how to handle adult situations, and Victor had trouble with some emotional jumps even now. The Cup of China came to mind, and Victor’s desperate  _ ‘I don’t know what to do when people cry in front of me.’ _

And he had chased that boy away. Whoever he was, this Dima, Victor had run him out of town and he never returned. It was hard to look Victor in the eye and say he didn’t have an effect in that situation--of course he had. He hadn’t helped a friend in need. It was right to feel some regret about it, even though it was not actually Victor’s fault. But that had been nearly ten years ago. Why was it still so fresh, so raw?

Yuuri did not know how to fix this scar. But he did know one thing with absolute certainty.

“...I’m not going to leave.” Yuuri reached out and touched the back of the hand Victor had rested loosely on the stick shift. It was reactive; suddenly, desperately, he needed to feel Victor warm and beside him.  “You know that, right?”

Shock widened Victor’s blue eyes, made him look over at Yuuri for just a fraction of a second. Then, something breathtaking: for a moment, that smile reached Victor’s eyes and it was  _ beautiful _ . It was all the stupid bright  _ ‘vkusno’ _ s, all the happy  _ ‘good morning, Yuuri’ _ s he’d dealt with back in Hasetsu. It was the kind of light Yuuri hadn’t seen in Victor’s eyes since they landed in Russia, and it was everything he could do to just keep the tears out of his eyes. Was it possible to just keep falling in love? The idea was stupid, but it put a smile on Yuuri’s face, too.

“I know,” Victor said some time later. Quiet, and afterthought.

They drove in silence again. Yuuri did not remove his hand, and the point of contact became a thrumming lifeline between them. This history couldn’t hurt Victor, because Yuuri would not let it. If a shield was what Victor needed, then that would be what Yuuri became.

He mulled over the information he’d been given, while they drove. The lights of St Petersburg began to warm the distance, a bright glow above the treetops. Yuuri wanted to know more, but wouldn’t ask. What had happened to Dima? Why did Victor only seem to refer to him in the past tense? Why was such a brilliant composer not famous by now? He’d hurt Victor enough to get this information, though. He knew what had happened in ‘09 that had so drastically changed the way Victor looked at the world, and that was what he’d wanted. Victor had  _ shown _ him this, and that was what he’d asked for.

Yuuri drew his thumb over Victor’s knuckles, soft and delicate. “Hey.”

Victor stole a glance sideways, more a flinch then a deliberate motion. Reactive, miserable. “Yeah?”

He leaned over and pecked Victor’s jaw, a chaste kiss that promised much more. “I love you.”

The rest of the drive home was silent, but comfortably so. Victor wasn’t smiling, but there was a light in his eyes that wasn’t there that morning, and Yuuri considered that a win. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! There will be another Weds update this week. Not ero, but because this chapter is kind of short. o: See you then~


	9. Inspiration

Morning came at him with a handful of tiny daggers against his poor retina. He didn’t immediately remember what time they’d gotten home, nor did he remember actually getting into bed. He was sore, he desperately needed a shower, he was still wearing his blue jeans and socks from when he’d fallen into bed.

He rolled over. Makkachin lifted his head and gave him a curious stare from the end of the mattress. The bed was otherwise empty. Groggy, joints aching, he extracted himself from the mess of tangled sheets, stumbled to his feet and slogged into the bathroom. 

The window in the bathroom faced due east, the pale late winter sun momentarily blinded him. The tile was warm, the air was moist from a recent shower. It was too early to think about what that might mean. He opened up the mirror cabinet, pulled out his toothbrush and began moving through his morning routine.

He picked up the toothpaste and squeezed some out onto the bristles of the brush.

Brushed his teeth. A rustling behind him, he ignored it.

Leaned down and spit. Rinsed his mouth with some water.

“Yuuri.”

He screamed and spun around. Victor was leaning against the open glass door of the shower stall, all sultry, smirking, and dripping wet. Also very naked. Yuuri’s eyes drifted down not once but twice, and each time he blushed a more vivid shade of red. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize you were in here, I can--”

Victor laughed. It was a beautiful sound, especially after the night they’d had. He leaned out of the shower stall and left a wet kiss on his cheek. “Yuuri, I’m going to remind you that we’re engaged. You can brush your teeth while I’m in here, it’s okay.”

If Yuuri had been anyone else (a better boyfriend, maybe, or a smoother operator), he would have made a comment back to that and maybe prompted some early morning fooling around. Victor was very naked, and Yuuri had to shower himself. But he was still very not used to this whole sexual thing, and he felt himself clamming up before the comment ever had a chance to take wing. He turned back to the bathroom mirror and started pulling out some floss instead, because it was far safer.

“I’m--I know, I’m just--”

“What shall we have for breakfast?” He saw Victor pull a towel off the rack and wrap it around his waist--something he was sure he did exclusively for Yuuri’s benefit. He moved on from the subject with that airy grace, and moved Yuuri past his anxiety in the same gesture. Another kiss, this one less wet, and Victor moved into the bedroom. “We could pick up something on the way down to the rink!”

He caught himself smiling stupidly at his hair brush and sprung back into motion. It was good to have  _ his _ Victor, even if there were still some things hanging over their heads. He’d needed this, this affirmation that things  _ weren’t _ going to change radically just because they’d moved countries. They could have a routine all their own, here.

The morning passed in a blur. They didn’t talk about it, any of the things they probably  _ needed _ to talk about, and Victor spent most of the morning dodging away from Yuuri’s worried glances, but the fact that Victor was  _ smiling _ was enough to keep him quiet. Yuuri wanted to ask, but he would wait. They had practice to go to, they had routines to cement. He hadn’t even decided on  _ music _ yet. Neither of them had. There was real work to be done, and the trial of last night seemed very far away, especially running under the bright morning sun.

The air on the immediate other side of the door was blasting hot, a technique to keep the cold air out but not a friendly gesture for his glasses. Yuuri frowned, pulled them off and rubbed at the fog with the hem of his shirt.

“So where were  _ you _ yesterday, huh? Skipping practice already?” Yuri confronted them as soon as they walked through the door, like he’d been lying in wait for them. The comment was mostly directed at Victor, but Yuuri had the sinking suspicion that Yuri held him just as accountable for their local legend’s absence. “You’re both  _ dumb _ and were probably playing  _ hookie _ .”

He wondered where Yuri, Russian child that he was, had learned a word like  _ hookie _ . That was the sort of word the students back in Detroit used. He hid the smile that followed behind his hand while he slid his glasses back on.

Victor laughed. “What if we did?”

Yuri scowled. “You  _ promised _ me your first day back you’d help me with my routine.  _ Again _ .”

He immediately stepped to intervene, feeling at least  _ partially _ responsible for keeping Victor away  _ all _ evening. “We’re both sorry! Vitya, why don’t you go work with him now? I’ll catch up.”

At first he didn’t know why Yuri was making the gagging noises, but then he saw how Victor’s eyes sparkled at him and he thought about what he’d said.  _ Vitya _ . He hadn’t used it outside of the bedroom yet. The embarrassment was immediate and overwhelming. He spun and bolted for the locker room, shouting some kind of excuse out of panic. Victor hollered something close to  _ love you _ . 

After a lap around the empty corridors of the rink he felt better. Jogging cleared his mind, and once he could think straight he could begin to convince himself that calling Victor  _ Vitya _ was  _ not _ necessarily something he had to be embarrassed about. It was a long and arduous process, and his feet wandered while he worked at it.  He hadn’t gotten a chance to properly  _ explore _ the rink yet. 

It reminded him much more of Detroit, than of home. In many ways he was glad for the familiarity; it stoked his determination to do his best, the same way moving to the States had felt five years ago. But it was also scary. Detroit was where he’d failed himself, his coach, his dreams. Russia was already feeling like a stranger place than home. What would he do if it was too much? What would that do to his relationship with Victor?

Back home there was a silver medal hanging on display. He’d promised to get a gold next. Could he do it?

Ultimately, his feet brought him back to the side of the rink. Victor and Yuri had already laced up and were doing some circuits around the rink to warm up. Yuuri folded his arms on top of the barrier and rested his chin on his wrists, content to watch for a time.

“Teach me the step sequence in that one clip of you. From the olympics or whatever.” Yuri didn’t make eye contact as he skated by.

Victor lit up. “From  _ Nocturne _ ? Come here.”

Yuuri couldn’t help the smile that welled up at the sight. This was why he’d moved; it had been tough, these past few days, but now he could sit and watch those two play on the ice and what else could be better than that? Maybe being on the ice  _ with _ them, but this was nice in a different way. Peaceful.

He glanced over at Yakov. He didn’t know how long the coach had been standing there, or how long he’d been staring that  _ intensely _ for. “Um...hi, Yakov.”

“Yuuri. How did it go?” Yakov kept grinding his teeth. It was distracting.

“L-last night?” Memories of Victor’s skin, of the space between them hot and sticky, hit him in the back of the head like a freighter. He swallowed thickly and reminded himself that was certainly  _ not _ what Yakov was asking about. “It went well. I think, um-”

They both glanced at Victor and Yuri. They seemed very concerned with each other--it looked like Yuri had a suggestion to make the step sequence something more. They were bouncing ideas back and forth and the sight was beautiful. They couldn’t talk  _ here _ , not about such ugly things, where the skaters could hear them.

“In my office?” Yakov asked.

He nodded. Yakov turned, and Yuuri followed the coach out behind the bleachers. There was a tiny steel door, scuffed from years of use. Beyond it was a cramped stairwell, where the noises from the rink echoed into a distorted version of themselves. The stairs were mesh wire, and their clanging footsteps were deafening in the small space. At the top of the stairs was a single wooden door, which Yakov opened with a beat-up key off the keyring on his belt. 

And inside was his office.

Yuuri didn’t know what he’d expected, honestly. Yakov pretended to care a lot less than he did, something he knew because Victor had tried showing his love through lectures for the first several months of their partnership. Yakov was a tough love kind of coach, but the photos and awards lining his walls were the kind of thing he expected out of a loving, overly proud father. He saw quite a few photos of a much younger Victor, several of Georgi, Mila, and even some of Yuri. There were faces he didn’t recognize, and faces he did. All of them had been placed with a deliberate care, a chronological order across the room.

“So, did he tell you?” Yakov asked, breaking the silence.

Yuuri realized he’d gotten distracted and jumped back to attention. He’d almost forgotten why they’d come up here, and the sudden reminder hit him like a fist in the gut. How much could he say? Victor had confided in him.

“He talked to me about Dima,” Yuuri said.

Yakov nodded. “Good.” He sat down at his desk with a quiet grunt, the kind of joints-aching grunt that came with age. “There are strategies to discuss, I’d like to have the both of you for that. We’ll talk about it later. Mr. Olav, Vitya’s agent and publicist is already on top of your internet presence. He said as long as he has Vitya on as a client, he might as well handle yours while you’re with us.”

A--publicist? An  _ agent? _ Yuuri balked. “Do I really need one?”

“You  _ should _ have one already. You’re a Grand Prix silver medalist, you have exhibitions to book. Do you want to do all that footwork yourself?” Yakov snapped. “Look--it’s besides the point. What  _ does _ matter is that you two can have all the PDA you want  _ outside _ of the country, but inside they’ll talk about arresting you, got it? There are laws. Vitya knows, but he’s a rule breaker. You’re not used to that kind of attention. You have to be prepared. And if it comes down to it, you may have to be the strong one.”

Yuuri wondered idly when Yakov had started to be  _ his _ coach, too, but it seemed that as long as he was going to be rinkmates with Yuri and Victor, then he was going to get Yakov as an honorary coach as well. “I-I can try.”

“...He got scared, with Dima. He ran. He told you that, too, right?” Yakov asked.

Yuuri nodded.

“He went into a slump after that. I don’t want a repeat with you.” 

He had to process that. Yakov’s stare was so intense that it was easy to mistake as a glare of frustration or hatred, and Yuuri immediately felt like Yakov was warning him away from Victor. But...no. He had no reason to do that, and he’d even said to Yuuri the morning before that he knew Yuuri was there to stay. So then--what? “I don’t understand.”

“I want you to come to me if he’s acting weird, is what that means.” He was mildly surprised by Yakov’s patience. But he was doing that real distracting thing with his jaw again, that teeth-grinding motion. “I’ve been raising that boy since he was thirteen. If there’s anyone that knows the stupid choices he’ll make, it’s me. Frankly, he’s been someone much better since working with you. I don’t want him to lose that focus. I  _ also _ don’t want him to burn himself out, so his skating is  _ my _ priority even if no one else seems to think of it. But happiness is a part of skating, and he’s happy now. So.”

Yakov had a very odd way of telling someone they were doing a good job. Yuuri smiled. “Thank you, coach.”

Was it just his imagination, or did Yakov go a little red? “I’m just looking out for one of my skaters, that’s all,” he grumbled. “And--you, too. You won the team over already, Yuuri. Not sure I could get rid of you even if I wanted to.” 

Oh.  _ Oh _ . Had he?  _ When? _ He’d expected rivalry; the others were a team, and he was the outsider top Japanese figure skater. What reason would they have to like him? He was thankful they let him skate here, use this rink, but his coach was Victor, not Yakov. But something else was happening.  “I did? I mean--I’m.” He stammered to a standstill, unsure of how to proceed. The need to run was powerful and hard to ignore.

Yakov waved it off. “Skating fans world-wide support you two, I want this country to do the same. But it’ll be work. You must be prepared for it.”

“I’m not afraid of work.”  _ I’ve proven myself to the world, haven’t I? _ The Grand Prix had been  _ nothing _ but work, and he’d loved every minute of it. This was just going to be a new kind of work, and at Victor’s side, nothing could scare him. Not even coming to Russia. Now that he was here, what could be nearly so scary? Everything was doable. He wasn’t alone anymore.

It earned him a stern nod. Yakov only dealt approval in small dollops, and he was already learning to appreciate what little was shown. A single nod felt like he’d made a world of progress with the old man. He was  _ accepted _ .

That warm fuzzy feeling was fleeting. Yakov jammed one finger at the door and glared at him. “You’re a harder worker than Vitya ever was, that good-for-nothing. Now get out on the ice, you’re dawdling.” 

He didn’t need to be told twice. One look out the window told him Victor and Yuri were still at it, and he hadn’t missed  _ everything _ quite yet. He dodged out the office door and took the steps down two at a time. It had been a long time since he felt so  _ light _ .

 

xxx

 

“Yuuri! You’re coming to practice tomorrow, right?” Mila seemed to have no personal space, which was something Yuuri was still trying to adjust to. She liked leaning on his locker, she liked watching him with a feline sense of satisfaction. He wasn’t sure he ever knew what was going on in her head, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

He nodded as he gathered his things and methodically shoved them into his backpack. “Y-yes. I’ll be here from now on, with Victor.”

“Mila, don’t scare him off,” Victor warned from the other side of the locker room.

“I’m  _ excited _ ,” she harped back at him. “It’s about time we got a Yuuri that isn’t such a  _ sourpuss _ all the time.”

A sound thud from the corridor leading to the rink. “I heard that!” Yuri hollered.

Mila laughed, a noise that was closer to a cackle. Something like his own sister laughing at his misfortune, he thought. Mila and Yuri’s relationship was charming in a nostalgic kind of way. “Well, anyway, I’m out of here.” She slapped Yuuri on the back with a force that was nearly enough to knock him clean off his feet. “I’ll see you losers tomorrow.  _ Dasvidaniya! _ ”

The rest of the team filtered out in ones and twos. Yuri was one of the last to leave, even though at fifteen Yuuri would expect him to be the most excited to get out of practice; he’d really turned into a workaholic over the course of the past year. He’d never been so proud of that boy as when he saw the amount of blood and sweat he’d poured into his senior debut. He was glad Yuri wasn’t easing up now that he had proven himself.

Victor waited for him in the lobby, and together they began their meandering path home. They were quiet, but it was comfortable. They went for a detour down by the water, instead of straight over the bridge to their apartment. It was a silent decision mostly made by Victor himself, but when Yuuri realized they were taking a stroll, he had no complaints. Victor was quiet, had been quiet all day. There was a strange stillness about him that hadn’t been there that morning, but one that he’d seen in Victor while they were out on the lake.

He wasn’t fool enough to believe that their problems were solved. Just because he knew what happened in Victor’s past, that didn’t make it go away. Yuuri stood with him, a silent comfort as they walked down to the beachside and followed the water’s edge. 

_ We should have went home for Makkachin _ , Yuuri thought to himself. He spotted another couple letting their dog run along the sand some yards down the beach, two silhouettes against the midday water. He wondered if that’s what they looked like to onlookers, those two bodies so close to each other, together and at peace. It didn’t matter who they were, what gender they were. They could be . Absently, he reached out and found Victor’s hand. Their fingers intertwined, and he was taken aback by how quickly and desperately Victor held his.

They continued to walk in silence, hand-in-hand. Yuuri waited.

“I was scared,” Victor said, unprompted and thoughtful.

Yuuri looked up at him. “Of what?”

“That you wouldn’t want to do this kind of thing.” He squeezed Yuuri’s hand to illustrate the point. “After you found out about the whole mess.”

Maybe it would be smart, to be more afraid. Victor had done his best to warn him, and even Yakov was telling him that it would be  _ work _ to have this relationship be successful under the public’s scrutiny. It seemed the smarter choice just to call it quits and head back to Japan where it was safer. But that wasn’t the answer Yuuri was going to choose, and they both knew it.

He dug his heels into the sand. Victor felt the pull and turned to face him, blue eyes puzzled. Still so troubled, laced with some fight that Yuuri was only allowed to see the very surface layers of. 

This was the man he’d adored as a child, the man that had crossed half the world to coach him, the man he’d fallen in love with over the course of a messy year learning to be something more than he’d ever thought he could be. When Victor had first landed, Yuuri had run from every touch, withdrawn and nervous and impossible to deal with. But Victor had been patient and loving and had met him when he was ready to open up.

Now it was Victor’s turn. Inch by inch. Yuuri would be patient and wait for the rest. 

He leaned up onto his toes, held Victor by the jaw and kissed him. The world shrunk to only encompass the bubble they stood in, the ocean wind whipping around them. Victor’s lips tasted like the ocean spray.

Slowly, reverently, they parted. Yuuri stood flat-foot again, comfortably within the circle of Victor’s arms. They could have stayed there for hours, he was sure; they’d done it before. But it was cold and he didn’t  _ really _ want to stand on the beach for  _ that _ much longer.

“Let’s get lunch,” Yuuri said.

“Mm.” Victor’s voice rumbled up through his chest. “What do you want to eat?”

He grinned. “Well, what’s your favorite?”

It felt suspiciously close to Victor’s first time eating katsudon, something he hoped to convey. Victor’s eyes glittered, and Yuuri knew he’d been successful. 

“ _ Lepyoshka  _ for lunch, then,” Victor hummed. He took Yuuri by the hand and began leading him back toward the road. “There’s a street vendor on the way home, usually. Let’s find it!”

So they went. Yuuri followed Victor’s lead, hand-in-hand, and that connection did not break once on their walk over. Victor held him like a drowning man, and Yuuri resolved himself to be the solidity they both needed. At the other end of the bridge was a food truck parked near an office building, with half a dozen customers watching the view off the bridge as they ate. Yuuri had never had  _ Lepyoshka  _ before, but it looked like some kind of pastry. Victor bought them two and handed him a warm discus of bread wrapped up in wax paper. They found a bench along the bridge and sat there to eat.

“Can I ask you something?” Yuuri asked.

Victor wasted no time eating. He tore bread off with his teeth with the same aggressive need to  _ enjoy _ as he did with katsudon, and hot pot. He  _ loved _ food, but even now, he looked a little sad. He paused, when he realized Yuuri was waiting for an answer. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”

_ You’re bothered by something _ . He knew that as a fact, but he didn’t want to just call Victor out. “You looked troubled during practice, and you only wanted to focus on my routine. What about yours? How is it going?” 

“Ah.” Victor didn’t look at him. He picked off another pinch of  _ Lepyoshka  _ and popped it into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully. “Not well.”

_ Not well _ .

“It’s not connected to...everything last night, is it?” He would hate it if he was responsible for Victor’s slump, if that’s what this was. Even if it wasn’t his fault, he was at least partially to blame for their lives being as complicated as they were.

Victor offered him another one of those half-shrugs, which Yuuri was quickly realizing meant ‘ _ maybe, I don’t want to think about it,’ _ approximately, anyway. It was Victor’s version of running away.

“Talk to me?” he asked quietly.

A heavy sigh. “I haven’t had luck working on my own program. I just want to work on yours right now.”

“But Russian nationals are--”

“I  _ know _ . Believe me. Yakov has been nagging my ears off.” Victor wouldn’t look at him. He turned his attention back to his food and munched on it sullenly.

“...Okay.”  _ I inspire him _ . Yuuri ate while he mulled over this new information. He  _ knew _ he was a focus for Victor--the man had left competitive skating for a whole year to coach him. If he was Victor’s inspiration, that meant this was something Yuuri could help with. He just had to figure out how to lay all these worries to rest, figure out how to make Victor want to  _ skate _ .

_ What can I give him now? _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second-to-last chapter here! Last one will be up on Saturday.


	10. Chapter 10

 

Victor met Yakov for lunch during one of his off-days nearly a week later. It was the old diner behind the rink, a hole-in-the-wall that no one but locals knew, that served some of the best  _ borscht _ in the city. It was a tradition, he supposed. Yakov had been taking him to eat here since he first moved to St Petersburg over a decade ago.

He stopped to greet the cook on his way in. Her name was Inna, she was nearing her sixties and had said hello to him in the same way for a decade. It was a constant, one of his cornerstone rituals to keep the rest of his facade upright. Coming here to eat with Yakov, saying hello to Inna the cook. Sending Yakov pictures of the vodka he used to drive himself into oblivion. They were all relics of a behavior he’d laid to rest, but here were the tiny things to remind him.

Once upon a time, he’d greedily agreed to any offer to go out and eat, because it meant a full meal. Yakov had known it. He wouldn’t accept money for groceries but he would accept a lunch here at Inna’s.

He felt an odd, devouring smile grace his lips. He ducked behind the front desk and wandered until he found the small corner table Yakov had claimed for them. The restaurant was warm, decorated in reds and deep golds. He’d always thought it would make for a good movie setting.

When Yakov had called him that morning, he’d expected some discussion about  _ strategies _ . He wasn’t ready for the glare Yakov leveled at him from across the table when he sat down.

“You’re skating has been sloppy, you’re distracted. You’re not even  _ coaching _ well. You’re a damn lucky man that Yuuri knows what he’s doing or you’d be a wreck on  _ both _ sides,” Yakov growled. “What is  _ wrong  _ with you?” Oh, so they were just cutting right to the chase, then. He didn’t know why he’d expected anything else, with Yakov.

_ What is wrong with you? _

He didn’t know how many people had asked him that over the past week. Everyone, every face that belonged to someone that claimed to care. The question was parroted at him from half a dozen puppets all neatly lined up on the stage of life, all feigning concern that he couldn’t feel and didn’t believe was real. Except for Yuuri. When Yuuri had asked it that morning, Victor had started to consider.

_ What’s wrong? _

Something about the news broadcast, but it went deeper. They hadn’t had trouble, no public outcries of perversion and no mobs with pitchforks at the door. Yet. The way Yakov texted him to make sure he’d called to get the heavy-duty windows installed that were shatter-proof worried him, but only because he was afraid Yuuri would think too much about it. He didn’t think it was the looming threat of the public that had gotten to him, even though it was certainly the public that prompted this...whatever it was.

He wasn’t going to think the word  _ slump _ , because it wasn’t a slump.

Yakov’s glare nailed him down to the seat. He shifted uncomfortably.

“It’s a slump, isn’t it?”

Victor deflated. “No it’s not.”

“Yes it is.” Yakov crossed his arms. “You’re not skating well, and you’re moody. It’s a slump.”

One of the waitresses came over with two deep bowls of  _ borscht _ . Victor picked up his spoon and examined it thoughtfully. The waitress must have sensed the mood, because she scurried off and made herself scarce without a word.

“Something is off,” Victor agreed. “I don’t have inspiration for my own program.”

Yakov scowled. “So, a slump.”

“It’s not a slump.”

His coach threw his hands up in the air. He was certain Yakov was imagining throwing him out the window, and didn’t blame him. A five-time champion was not an easy thing to work with, he was sure.

“Regardless, you can’t skate and that has to change. Have you talked to Yuuri about it?” Yakov began mixing his bowl of soup, the quiet clink of metal on porcelain was the only sound for a long moment.

“Have I talked to Yuuri?” Victor parroted, struck dumb by the suddenness of the question. Was Yakov— _ trusting _ Yuuri? It wasn’t like him to so willingly count on a stranger like that. Had they been talking when he wasn’t around? The old man was a schemer. Victor took the immediate visceral need to protect Yuuri and stuffed it down before it could show in his eyes. “You mean about the slump?”

Yakov nodded, and watched him. And he watched Yakov. The stare was intense, hunting for something that Victor was not willing to offer up. It was a long silence, an unspoken measure of wits as Yakov  _ dared _ him to squeeze out of this line of interrogation. His coach believed him cornered.

Abruptly, he turned around and hailed down the cook. “Inna, the  _ borscht  _ is  _ wonderful _ today!”

“Vitya complimenting me, be still my heart.” Inna bustled over to the table and smacked him playfully with a dish rag. She leaned on the table, saw the look in Yakov’s eye and grinned. “You only do that when you want something.”

The fact that his coach didn’t even bother to form words gave Victor an idea of just  _ how _ pissed off he was. He ignored the issue, of course. He’d much rather talk to Inna, and letting Yakov stew over it was satisfying in a very childish way. 

“I just wanted to see your smiling face,” Victor chirped. A lie, of course.

Inna’s wrinkled eyes narrowed, her eyes were bright and fierce despite her age. “Vitya, when are you bringing that boy around?”

That caught him off-guard. “...Yuuri?”

“Yes, that’s the one. When are you bringing him in? You’re a poor son of Russia if you’ve kept him here a whole week and haven’t brought him ‘round Inna’s,” she chided. “What has he been eating? That garbage off the food trucks?”

He grinned. “You caught me. I’ll bring him down tomorrow night, how’s that?”

This offer seemed to appease the demi-goddess of food. “Fine. I’ll be expecting you, you’d best not let an old lady down.” She gave him a pat on the head--the same thing she’d been doing since he was sixteen--and retreated to the back. A fresh customer had pulled up to the street outside and she had duties to attend.

She wanted to see Yuuri. He didn’t know why that surprised him so much. Had he expected Inna to have the same opinion as the talking heads on television? Maybe. But he’d never truly asked her, had he? She’d been fine with--

_ Gray eyes twinkling at him over a mug of tea, chiding him for picking the beets out of his soup, “they’ll help you put on weight, Vitya.” _

\--she’d been fine with Dima. So why not Yuuri?

“Vitya,” Yakov warned, and broke him out of his thoughts.

He was really going to pursue this, wasn’t he? Usually Yakov let questions drop if he was distracted for long enough. Something about this slump and Yuuri’s involvement in it had Yakov trained on it like a bloodhound. What a mess.

“To an extent,” he admitted.

Was he going to admit that Yuuri had asked about it that morning, and that he’d managed to thoroughly change the topic with a few well-placed kisses and an instagram photo? No, of course not. But he was sure Yakov suspected foul play. Victor was  _ very _ good at avoiding problems he did not want to talk about.

“Get. It. Figured. Out.” His coach booked no room for argument, this was Yakov’s Most Serious face and Victor suspected he would be out a coach if he pushed any harder. He seriously weighed the risks, if it was worth pressing him to see if it was a bluff. Probably not.

He sat back in his chair, combed his fingers through his hair and sighed. “I’ll work on it.”

“You don’t have  _ time _ , Vitya. The other skaters are already days into practicing their routines, you don’t even have one yet.” He saw the worry in Yakov’s eyes, the quiet  _ you aren’t as young as they are _ , the doubt that the seeping age of 28 had left. Far too old for competitive skating, well past the age many retired at.

_ Have you retired already?  _ Maybe he was just a fossil convinced he had a career left ahead of him.

He didn’t have much of an appetite anymore.

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” he said blandly. He left his napkin on the table and some cash, which Yakov promptly refused but he left sitting on the table anyway. Yakov had never been able to stop him from doing what he wanted. He only thought of himself, after all.

 

xx

 

           There was a doormat that said  _ welcome home _ in Russian where there used to only be bare tile and a listing coat rack. The rack was replaced with a few hooks on the wall beside the door, the mat was clean and new, and somewhere inside the apartment Makkachin barked   
at him.

He had to stoop down and touch the mat, to make sure it was real.

“Do you like it? I um--I wanted to get some proper curtains, so I ran down to the store and I saw that and--”

Yuuri was standing in the mouth of the hallway, in slacks and a t-shirt that was entirely too big on him, and was definitely one of the shirts he’d picked up in Fukuoka several years back during the Prix. It had a penguin on the breast pocket, and had been one of those impulse buys. Yuuri looked good in it.

“..and...” Yuuri’s brows knitted together, that cute little pout he got when he was trying to wrap his head around something. “Is something wrong?”

Maybe. Of course not. _Why would anything be wrong?_

He looked down at the mat again. It had this flower embellishment along the bottom that was homey, a nice subtle touch. He smiled at Yuuri and shook his head. “I like it.”

Was Yuuri relieved? Something relaxed in those brown eyes, so maybe the smile had been a convincing one. Or maybe Yuuri was just happy that he liked the rug. That was just like him; find something and like it only to feel bad about liking it later. But he did like the rug. It was adorable and homey and exactly what he expected out of Yuuri. This was everything he’d ever wanted, and everything he didn’t deserve. New _curtains?_ He saw flowers on the counter, and there was silverware, dishes, pots and pans in those cupboards that had stood empty for a decade.

He was coming home to a warm apartment. A lived-in apartment. He was not coming home to silence. He was not coming home to ghosts.

“That’s good, I—um. I was worried about it, I guess. Do you want to see the curtains? I need some help hanging them.” Yuuri put a hand out for Makkachin, who had come up behind him to greet Victor as well.

God, it _hurt_. He’d never felt it for Yuuri like this before. For so many months it had been about Yuuri’s career, just a mad rush to complete a program and make Yuuri into the beautiful creature he knew he could be. It had been _safe_ when it was just Yuuri’s career. Coaching had been a rebirth, a recreation of himself to better serve this boy that had stolen his heart and ran back to Japan with it. But now it was _more_. It was white-hot and full of _need_.

“…Vitya, are you sure you’re okay?” Yuuri’s voice was very small and very muffled.

He didn’t know when he’d moved, but he wasn’t standing at the door anymore. He was holding Yuuri against his chest, clutching him to staunch the way this messy thing was threatening to rise up like a tide. He hadn’t taken his coat off, or his shoes. It was a silly thing to think about, the fact that he would be tracking mud across Yuuri’s nice new mat. Wasn’t that what the mat was for?

Makkachin whined. It was a worried noise.

He kept one arm wrapped around Yuuri’s waist, too scared to let him go. He brought his other hand up, brushed fine hair out of those huge brown eyes and tried to pretend he only wanted to fuss. “Show me the curtains,” he said.

Moving felt automated. He only separated from Yuuri long enough to shed the jacket and shoes, both of which he left on the floor with disinterest, and he went through those motions so robotically that he was certain Yuuri would catch onto his charade. His boiling secret, the _‘you’re not real,’_ that simmered just beneath his skin. But he didn’t. Or if he did, he didn’t care, and that was even _more_ far-fetched, so he decided Yuuri missed the red flags. It was a safer thought.

Yuuri pulled him into the bedroom by the hand, their fingers interlaced. “I was thinking something plain at first, I just wanted to get _something_ up, but then I found these deep red ones and…well, here. See?”

There were shopping bags on the bed, toiletries and curtain rods and boxes of household staples, like detergent and cleaner. Things normal people had in normal apartments. The things that whispered _home_ and _clean_ and everything good in this world. Yuuri was holding up the curtains he’d bought against the plain off-white of the wall, and he had to admit that they did look nice.

He felt a wry smile crawl across his lips. It felt sick, but there was humor here and he held it with the desperation of a drowning man. “We’ll have to get a matching comforter, you realize.”

Yuuri brightened. “You like them?”

He nodded. “Do you want to hang them now?”

He didn’t need a verbal ‘yes,’ he could see the excitement on his face. So they did. Victor was thankful for the distraction, and measuring out distances from window frames with the measuring tape they’d dug out of the deepest kitchen drawer was a fine distraction. He held the curtain rod for Yuuri while he drew guiding lines with a pencil. He drove the nails in, Yuri slid the curtains onto the metal rod and before long they were hanging them up properly. Together.

Yuuri laughed, when they were done. “And Mari didn’t think I’d be any good at this domestic thing. I should send her a picture.”

He kissed Yuuri then, because words were being difficult today and he needed some way of showing his appreciation that didn’t involve his voice cracking. They lingered there, lips nearly touching, Yuuri within the protective circle of his arms and for a moment everything felt right in the world.

“So…” Yuuri flattened the collar of Victor’s shirt with his fingertips, nose inches away from his chest. “You going to tell me what Yakov wanted?”

Victor offered a watery, weak smile. “It’s Yakov. He wanted to blow steam at me.” It was a flimsy explanation and they both knew it. Did he hope Yuuri let him get away with it? Or was he hoping for something more? He didn’t know.

“Was it about your program for Nationals?”

He nodded.

Yuuri frowned. “And how you’re having trouble with it?”

Another nod. He couldn’t make eye contact.

“So...what’s wrong?” Yuri chased his eyes, snuck closer and bent his knees so their gazes met again. 

_ What’s wrong? _

He didn’t know why Yuuri was having such infinite patience for him. How many times had he asked that question? How many times had Victor evaded? What was he running from, though? Why didn’t he want to say it? It was a ragged mess he’d shoved into one corner of his mind that he’d been ignoring for years. He tried to continue the tradition, but their first week in Russia had done its best to drudge up something he’d convinced himself to forget about.

“There’s a box under the bed,” Victor said carefully. He sunk, propped up against the wall, and sat cross-legged on the floor. “Open it for me?”

He got a blank look while Yuuri’s mind played catch-up. Then he wheeled and moved over to the bed. “The cardboard one? I saw it when I was unpacking, but I didn’t move it. What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.”

Yuuri knelt beside the bed. One arm went under, fished around, then dragged out an unassuming dusty box covered in postal stamps. He flinched as soon as he saw it. Makkachin moved over from the door where he’d been carefully watching their curtain-hanging, and laid down beside him.

Victor Nikiforov existed in pieces, and those pieces were not allowed to touch.

“It says,  _ to Victor Nikiforov _ . No return address. You want me to open it?”

He sunk to the ground beside Makkachin and wrapped his arms around the dog. Then he nodded. “Open it.”

Those pieces were not allowed to touch, but today they had to.

“O-okay.” Yuuri brought the box closer, and sat near enough that Victor could feel his warmth. It was exactly as close as he needed him. “Is this…” 

He reached inside and removed sheafs of paper. Two sizes; Victor could see it almost without looking. He already knew what would be inside, deep in his gut. A few letters, still in envelopes, and the rest were the large print manuscript drafts that Dima used to pour his soul into. Last was something that looked like a legal document. Yuuri put the rest down, and brought the letter up to examine it inches from his nose.

“I can’t read Russian yet,” Yuuri groaned, and handed it over. “You’re going to have to translate.”

It was fine print on expensive paper, signed by and elegant hand. A law office firm’s title was stamped in big bold letters on the upper corner. It was all very official, and very much what he’d expected. “Enclosed you will find all items written to you of Mr. Dmitri Sokolov’s estate. Per our phone conversation, I have sent them by post and…” his throat caught. 

“Victor...this is a notice of a will and testament. Is Dima  _ dead? _ ”

He flinched and held Makkachin tighter. The dog licked his chin reassuringly. “Yes.”

“ _ Oh _ , I didn’t know--”

“I know.”

Yuuri had no idea because he hadn’t told him. He hadn’t spoken a word of this notice to  _ anyone _ , not even Yakov. The small box that had arrived in the mail several months after he’d said his final goodbyes to Dima, the unassuming postal worker that had asked him to sign on the dotted line to acknowledge that he was, in fact, Victor Nikiforov and this package was meant for him. He hadn’t believed it for a while. Hiding it under the bed had made the problem vanish, and after the end of that summer he’d been a different man anyway. At the beginning of every season he re-created himself, after all. The Victor that had known Dima had vanished a very long time ago.

He felt it opening like a chasm beneath him, this knotted grief that he’d ignored for so long. The guilt. Yuuri moved, then, distracted him from it with warm fingers on his face and he followed the touch. He picked himself up and collapsed on Yuuri’s lap, where gentle hands combed through his hair and the smell of him was everywhere.

“What else is in the box?” he asked.

“Oh, um...let me look.” Yuuri reached for the documents with his free hand. He was careful not to dislodge Victor, which was charming but in his current state was nearly too kind for him to handle. He didn’t deserve this boy that had followed him from Japan. Yuuri needed someone that was real, not a make-pretend shell like him.

It was the manuscript pages that he was afraid to see.

“It looks like the score to some music...oh! I recognize this one. It’s what you skated in ‘07 for your free program. Let’s see, what else is there..” Yuuri leafed through pages, looking for more titles. “These, as well. I think he left you the music you performed to. I don’t recognize these two, though.”

He lifted his head enough to read the title Yuuri was holding, then immediately wished he hadn’t. He rolled over and pressed his face into the warmth of Yuuri’s shirt. “It’s new.”

“...Do you think he wrote it after...you know?”

_ You know _ . After he’d broken the man’s heart because next season was starting, and the annoyance of the press combined with the damage to Dima’s career hadn’t made the relationship seem worth it. After he’d made a decision more meant for computers than people, an efficiency calculation. How to hurt the least number of people, how to salvage the damage. 

“Yes,” he croaked.

A brief silence, while Yuuri studied the papers. He heard Yuuri rustling around, but he didn’t have the courage to look at the contents. He knew there would be a letter, and he feared that it was Dima’s handwriting inside. It would be in Russian, though. And that was not something he should expect Yuuri to deal with, anyway.

“I think you should listen to this,” Yuuri said softly. “Vitya...you’re having trouble with inspiration for your free program, right? What if…”

He tensed, and said nothing. He expected the words to fall like a blow, and prepared himself for it.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong, but...when I run from things, they get scary and everything becomes hard to do. But if I just turn and embrace that thing, I always feel a lot better. I don’t really know what happened between the two of you, but maybe...if you skate to what he wrote you, the  _ last _ thing he wrote you...this will all start to heal.” 

His eyes slid closed. Yuuri ran a thumb over his cheek.

Dima had been nothing but a collection of impressions and half-dream memories for so long that he’d begun to think he’d never existed at all. Now that illusion was shattered, and he was staring at something Dima had  _ made _ him long after he’d broken the man’s heart. Yuuri was right, of course he was right. But he knew just as vividly that if Yuuri hadn’t been here, he would have run from this his entire life. It didn’t matter how put-together he appeared to the public, he would let this haunt him until the end of his days. Dogged, it would chase at his heels until he finally succumbed to it, the ghost that he would never turn around to look at.

Yuuri sat in diligent silence. That warmth was a wall around him, protective and sheltering. He didn’t want to move ever again.

“What happened to him?” Yuuri asked. His voice was quiet, unsure. He didn’t know if he should be asking this, but honestly, Victor was surprised it had taken so long. Most people wanted to know as soon as the word  _ dead _ left his lips. But here was Yuuri, asking as almost an afterthought.

“It was the next winter. I don’t know what did him in. I know is family wouldn’t take him back because of the accusations.” He remembered hearing it from a bright-eyed woman who had not spoken to him in years, someone he should have called blood but hadn’t considered  _ family _ a concept in a decade. ‘ _ It’s your fault, Vitya,’ _ she’d called just to tell him.

“That’s awful...I don’t understand why a family would do that,” Yuuri said sadly. 

He pressed closer to the warmth at Yuuri’s core, looking to curl up there and never emerge. This was it, his final resting place. “I do.” 

Yuuri leaned down and kissed Victor’s forehead. “Hey.”

He turned his head just enough to see Yuuri’s face. The smile he found there was so loving that it stung.

“You can’t control family. It’s not your fault his didn’t help him. Okay? Don’t blame yourself for that.” Another kiss, this time on his cheek. 

It  _ was _ his fault. But he didn’t know how he was going to convey that to Yuuri, delicate Yuuri that had always been blessed with a family that knew how to live a good life, a loving life. He desperately adored the Katsuki family for being everything he’d never known as a child, and clung to both the family and Yuuri like they were his last chance at building something of his life before his competitive career came to an end.

He  _ wanted _ a family. And he hated that Dima had died alone. How could he deserve one, when he’d killed an innocent man? This was an old, familiar pain. He hadn’t let himself feel it this close since he’d cut his hair, and the sudden resurgence made him nostalgic, almost. Nostalgic in the most self-hating, destructive ways.

This was it. This was the mess, the disgusting shattered massacre that pretended it was a real person. This was what he didn’t want Yuuri to see. The thing he’d kept such a safe secret all these months.

“I think I understand now,” Yuuri said. 

A fraction of a turn and he could see Yuuri’s face out of the corner of his eye. He looked oddly happy, despite the situation. “What?”

“I understand why you don’t have silverware from your mom.” A steadfast wall between himself and the world, this Yuuri. He said it so plainly, but somehow it didn’t hurt. “And it’ll get better. I’ll bring silverware enough for both of us, and Mom would love it if we came there on the holidays, and they love  _ you _ . You’re not alone with this anymore.”

It was stupid, because of course his family had nothing to do with this--or that’s what he’d thought. But for some reason the open honesty there, the raw love and adoration and kindness set him over the edge. There on the floor, wedged between Yuuri and Makkachin’s warmth, he cried it out. Seven years since he heard the news, since he’d gotten the letter and the package, and he finally let himself grieve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last official chapter guys! I AM working on an epilogue, but I do not expect to be done editing it by next Saturday. Right now I'm shooting for the 1st. c: Thank you to everyone who reviewed, they warmed my heart. I had a lot of fun writing this! I have considered releasing a one-shot that is in Victor's past, but I'm not sure what the interest level is? Let me know! I've also considered writing about the beginning of the Russian nationals/Victor writing his program, buuuut it's going to take a ton of research. That means it'll be a while, haha. Anyway, let me know what you think! Epilogue to come!


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